《金钱崛起》封面

对尼尔·弗格森所著《金钱的崛起》的赞誉

Praise for The Ascent of Money, by Niall Ferguson

《伦敦时报》年度圣诞好书:《金钱》

The London Times Christmas Books of the Year: Money

货币崛起》敏锐地预见了当前金融危机的许多方面,这场危机已经导致银行倒闭、政府大规模救助以及全球市场动荡。

‘[The Ascent of Money] shrewdly anticipates many aspects of the current financial crisis, which has toppled banks, precipitated gigantic government bailouts and upended global markets.’

——角谷美智子,《纽约时报》

—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“你不可能忽视尼尔·弗格森。他就像辩论俱乐部里最聪明的孩子,整夜泡在图书馆里,挖掘出别人想不到的事实……《金钱的崛起》一书常常引人入胜,带领读者深入探究重大事件背后的真相,揭示了最成功的大国是如何始终依靠精明的资金运作的。”

‘It’s impossible to ignore Niall Ferguson. He’s like the brightest kid in the debating club, the one who pulls all-nighters in the library and ferrets out facts no one thought to uncover. . . . [The Ascent of Money is] an often enlightening and enjoyable spelunking tour through the underside of great events, a lesson in how the most successful great powers have always been underpinned by smart money.’

—— 《纽约时报书评》

The New York Times Book Review

'迷人。'

‘Fascinating.’

——法里德·扎卡利亚,《新闻周刊》

—Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek

“弗格森以引人入胜的语言,按时间顺序组织章节,涵盖了股票、信贷和大宗商品市场……当他谈到与金钱相关的行为心理学时,他对我们当前的处境提出了最令人惊讶的见解。”

‘In remarkably readable, chronologically organized chapters, Ferguson covers stocks, credit and commodities markets. . . . It’s when he talks about the behavioral psychology surrounding money that Ferguson has the most surprising things to say about our current situation.’

——伊丽莎白·伊莎多拉·戈尔德,《纽约时报》

—Elizabeth Isadora Gold, TimeOut New York

“弗格森先生的《金钱崛起》一书,标志着他重返……他自己的金融史领域……它没有回避当下,而是追溯了抵押贷款危机的根源,将其置于我们‘财产所有制民主’的几十年历史中,并劝诫人们在悲观的预测面前保持坚韧。”

‘With The Ascent of Money, Mr. Ferguson has returned . . . to his own Elba of financial history. . . . It doesn’t shy away from the present day, tracing the roots of the mortgage crisis back through many decades of our “property-owning democracy”, and counseling stoicism in the face of gloomy forecasts.’

——大卫·华莱士-威尔斯,《纽约观察家报》

—David Wallace-Wells, The New York Observer

“弗格森的《货币崛起 》……为我们展现了货币运作的全貌,以及几个世纪以来各个国家经济中繁荣与萧条的周期性变化。”

‘Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money . . . [gives] us the big picture of how money works and the booms and busts that have cycled through the centuries in various national economies.’

——吉塔·夏尔马-詹森,《密尔沃基哨兵日报》

—Geeta Sharma-Jensen, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

尼尔·弗格森的新书《货币崛起:世界金融史》记录了资本演变过程中的剧烈波动。这位哈佛大学历史学家认为,金融的崛起在各个时代都发挥了积极作用(尽管他也对金融的未来提出了一些警告)。

‘Niall Ferguson’s new book, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, documents tumultuous swings in the evolution of capital. The Harvard historian defends the rise of finance as a force for good through the ages (though he has some warnings for its future, too).’

——柯克·辛克尔,《美国新闻与世界报道》

—Kirk Shinkle, U.S. News and World Report

“一部经典的传统叙事历史,里面有英雄和恶棍,有梦想家和无赖。”

‘Good old fashioned narrative history, complete with heroes and villains, visionaries and scoundrels.’

——詹姆斯·普雷斯利,彭博社

—James Pressley, Bloomberg

“本书以引人入胜且令人信服的方式,探讨了人类对金钱(无论肮脏与否)的迷恋。”

‘An engaging and convincing exploration of humankind’s love affair with lucre, filthy and otherwise.’

—— 《基督教科学箴言报》

The Christian Science Monitor

“弗格森的书读起来比你想象的要容易得多……他带领读者穿越岁月,环游世界。”

‘Ferguson’s book reads more easily than you might suspect. . . . [He] takes readers across the years and around the world.’

——哈里·莱文斯,《圣路易斯今日报》

—Harry Levins, St. Louis Today

作者文笔流畅,无论是对冲基金的起源、国际贸易逆差的运作机制,还是住房抵押贷款证券化(后者正是当前诸多担忧的根源),他都能娓娓道来。他避免了经济学的枯燥乏味,同时又不忽略细节,可谓物超所值。本书是了解德拉克马、第纳尔和美元世界的实用入门读物。

‘The author is a fluent interpreter, whether writing of the origins of the hedge fund, the workings of international trade deficits or the securitization of home mortgages—the last of which is the cause of so much current worry. He avoids the aridity of economics without skimping on details, offering lots of bang for the buck. A useful introduction to the world of drachmas, dinars and dollars.’

—— 《科克斯书评》

Kirkus Reviews

企鹅出版社

PENGUIN BOOKS

金钱崛起

THE ASCENT OF MONEY

尼尔·弗格森是英国最著名的历史学家之一。他是斯坦福大学胡佛研究所米尔班克家族高级研究员、哈佛大学欧洲研究中心高级研究员,以及北京清华大学客座教授。他著有畅销书《罗斯柴尔德家族》《战争的悲哀》《帝国》《巨像》《世界大战》、 《文明》《基辛格》,并定期为世界各地的报刊杂志撰稿。他根据《金钱的崛起》一书制作的PBS电视系列片荣获国际艾美奖最佳纪录片奖。

Niall Ferguson is one of Britain’s most renowned historians. He is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a Senior Fellow of the Center for European Studies, Harvard University, and a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. The bestselling author of The House of Rothschild, The Pity of War, Empire, Colossus, The War of the World, Civilization, and Kissinger, he also writes regularly for newspapers and magazines all over the world. His PBS television series based on The Ascent of Money won the International Emmy for Best Documentary.

要了解更多关于尼尔·弗格森和与本书相关的研究,请访问www.niallferguson.com

To find out more about Niall Ferguson and the research connected to this book visit www.niallferguson.com.

作者:尼尔·弗格森

ALSO BY NIALL FERGUSON

罗斯柴尔德家族

The House of Rothschild

第一卷:金钱的先知(1798–1848)

VOLUME 1: MONEY’S PROPHETS (1798–1848)

罗斯柴尔德家族

The House of Rothschild

第二卷:世界银行家(1849–1999)

VOLUME 2: THE WORLD’S BANKER (1849–1999)

巨人

Colossus

美国帝国的兴衰

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

世界大战

The War of the World

二十世纪的冲突与西方的衰落

TWENTIETH-CENTURY CONFLICT AND THE DESCENT OF THE WEST

高级金融家

High Financier

西格蒙德·瓦尔堡的生平与时代

THE LIVES AND TIME OF SIEGMUND WARBURG

文明

Civilization

西方与其余地区

THE WEST AND THE REST

大退化

The Great Degeneration

制度如何衰败,经济如何消亡

HOW INSTITUTIONS DECAY AND ECONOMIES DIE

基辛格

Kissinger

1923–1968:理想主义者

1923–1968: THE IDEALIST

广场和塔楼

The Square and the Tower

从共济会到脸书:人脉与权力

NETWORKS AND POWER, FROM THE FREEMASONS TO FACEBOOK

书名:《货币崛起》,副标题:世界金融史,作者:尼尔·弗格森,出版社:企鹅出版社

版本 3

Version_3

悼念

In Memoriam

杰拉尔德·D·费尔德曼

Gerald D. Feldman

(1937年—2007)

(1937–2007)

第二版序言

Preface to the Second Edition

场景一——ACE抵押贷款经纪公司: “我们助您梦想成真”

客户:哎呀,我想买房子,但我没攒下首付,而且我觉得我负担不起每月的房贷。您能帮帮我吗?

ACE抵押贷款经纪人:当然可以!因为您的房子价值只会上涨,所以我们不再需要首付了!而且我们可以为您提供几年非常非常低的利率。以后我们会提高利率,好吗?

C:当然没问题。嗯,还有一件事——我的老板是个混蛋,可能不会核实我的工作经历。这会有问题吗?

AMB:不。我们可以给你提供一份特殊的“谎言贷款”,你可以自己核实你的工作和收入!

SCENE 1 – ACE MORTGAGE BROKERS: ‘We Make Your Dreams Come True’

CUSTOMER: Gee, I’d like to buy a house but I haven’t saved any money for a downpayment and I don’t think I can afford the monthly payments. Can you help me?

ACE MORTGAGE BROKER: Sure! Since the value of your house will always go up, we don’t need downpayments anymore! And we can give you a really really low interest rate for a few years. We’ll raise it later, okay?

C: Sure, no problem. Umm, there’s one other thing – my employer is a real prick and might not verify my employment. Would that be a problem?

AMB: Nope. We can get you a special ‘Liar’s Loan’ and you can verify your own employment and income!

我不太确定具体是什么时候收到那份名为《次贷危机入门指南》的幻灯片,那是2008年初有人匿名发给我的。但我记得当时我就觉得,这份指南几乎不可能被超越,它完美地阐释了在我撰写《金钱崛起》期间开始,并在该书出版后的几个月里达到顶峰的金融连锁反应。这份指南的45张幻灯片讲述了“王牌抵押贷款经纪公司”(Ace Mortgage Brokers)发放的“劣质”抵押贷款是如何被卖给“班克兰第一银行”(First Bank of Bankland, Inc.),而“班克兰第一银行”又是如何将这些贷款转卖给“沃尔的RSG投资银行”(RSG Investment Bank of Wall)的。街上。真正聪明的人(因此得名RSG)想出了“创造一种新的证券,并用这些糟糕的抵押贷款作为抵押品”,然后将由此产生的担保债务凭证出售给像“挪威乡村养老基金”这样的投资者。我们现在都知道故事的结局了。

I am not quite sure exactly when I received ‘The Subprime Primer’, an anonymous slide deck that someone emailed me early in 2008. I do remember thinking that it was unlikely ever to be surpassed as an introduction to the financial chain reaction that began as I was writing The Ascent of Money and reached its climax in the months after the book was published. The Primer’s forty-five slides tell the story of how ‘crappy’ mortgage loans made by ‘Ace Mortgage Brokers’ came to be sold to ‘First Bank of Bankland, Inc.’, who then sold them to ‘RSG Investment Bank of Wall Street’. The really smart guys (hence RSG) were the ones who came up with the idea of ‘creat[ing] a new security and us[ing] these crappy mortgages as collateral’, and then selling the resulting collateralized debt obligation to investors such as the ‘Norwegian Village Pension Fund’. We all now know how the story ended.

从“信贷紧缩”演变为“全球金融危机”,再到“大衰退”,至今已过去十年。现在是时候更新世界金融史了。这绝非易事。极少有经济学家预见到这场危机,但事后却有大量经济学家试图解释它,由此产生了大量质量参差不齐的文献。与此同时,政界人士、央行行长和金融监管机构也试图改进金融体系,通常基于某种关于危机成因的理论。关于危机的进程,尤其是为什么在大多数国家,危机没有演变成全面萧条,也有大量著述。我们应该感谢谁或什么,才使得2010年代没有重蹈1930年代的覆辙?是美联储?是约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯的精神?还是中国雄心勃勃的刺激计划?

Ten years have now passed since the escalation of the ‘credit crunch’ into a ‘global financial crisis’ and then a ‘great recession’. It is time to bring the financial history of the world up to date. This is no easy task. Very few economists foresaw the crisis, but a great many have tried retrospectively to explain it, generating a large literature of distinctly mixed quality. At the same time, politicians, central bankers and financial regulators have sought to make improvements to the financial system, usually on the basis of some theory or other about the causes of the crisis. A great deal has also been written about the course of the crisis – in particular why, in most countries, it did not turn into a full-blown depression. Whom or what should we thank for the fact that the 2010s were not the 1930s? The Federal Reserve? The spirit of John Maynard Keynes? Or perhaps China’s spectacular stimulus program?

那么,我们应该责怪谁或什么,才导致2010年代的经济表现不如1990年代?危机后的复苏为何如此令人失望?哈佛经济学家拉里·萨默斯所说的“长期停滞”是否恰当?或者,他的同事肯·罗格夫与卡门·莱因哈特共同提出的观点是否正确:如此大规模的金融危机必然会导致一段漫长但终将结束的经济衰退期?欧洲对危机的处理不当是否导致了危机的持续?或者,奥巴马政府是否通过过于复杂的监管,给美国经济机器“撒了沙子”?正如一些人所言,如果采取更大规模的财政刺激措施,经济复苏是否会更快?或者,相反,如果减税和放松管制措施在2009年而不是八年后实施,结果是否会更好?过去十年中出现的这些问题和其他问题,在本新版的结尾新增的两章中都得到了解答。

And whom or what should we blame for the fact that the 2010s were also not the 1990s? Why was the recovery that followed the crisis so underwhelming? Was it justified to speak, as Harvard economist Larry Summers did, of ‘secular stagnation’? Or has his colleague Ken Rogoff turned out to be right when he argued, along with Carmen Reinhart, that such a large financial crisis was bound to result in a prolonged but finite economic hangover? Was it perhaps Europe’s mishandling of the crisis that made it so protracted? Or did the administration of Barack Obama throw sand in the American economic machine, in the form of over-complex regulation? Might the recovery have been more rapid, as some have argued, with even larger fiscal stimulus? Or, on the contrary, might it have been better if tax cuts and deregulation had been tried in 2009 rather than eight years later? These and other questions that have arisen over the past decade are addressed in two new chapters at the end of this new edition.

回首十年,有两件事让我印象深刻。首先,《货币崛起》一书的分析框架对读者大有裨益。该书准确地预见到,尽管2008年夏天的情况已经十分糟糕,但还会进一步恶化。美国经济衰退不仅即将到来,而且已经开始。世界各地的银行确实即将缩减资产负债表;许多影子银行即将被淘汰。我的预言也是正确的,欧洲受到的影响至少与美国一样严重。我预见到金融界将出现“大衰落”,这一预言也同样正确。我认为,这场日益加深的金融危机无法用简单的解释来概括,而需要考察国际支付和投资体系的六种不同弊病:

Looking back ten years, I have been struck by two things. First, the analytical framework of The Ascent of Money served readers well. The book correctly foresaw that, bad as things already were in the summer of 2008, they were about to get a great deal worse. A US recession was not just coming; it had already begun. Banks all over the world were indeed about to shrink their balance sheets; many shadow banks were about to be swept away. I was right, too, that Europe would be at least as badly affected as the United States. And I was right to foresee a ‘great dying’ in the financial world. I argued that this deepening financial crisis could not be explained simplistically, but required a consideration of six different pathologies of the international system of payments and investments:

  1. 西方银行业杠杆率过高或资本不足;

  2. The excessive leverage or inadequate capitalization of the banks of the Western world;

  3. 短期债务市场受到《次贷危机入门》中所描述的那种有毒证券的污染;

  4. The contamination of the short-term debt market with toxic securities of the sort depicted in ‘The Subprime Primer’;

  5. 美联储的货币政策失误,对美国房地产市场过热的迹象视而不见;

  6. Errors of monetary policy by the Federal Reserve System, which turned a blind eye to signs of overheating in the American real estate market;

  7. 衍生品这种新型金融形式的出现,给金融体系增加了一层不透明的复杂性;

  8. The emergence of the new forms of financial life known as derivatives, which added an opaque layer of complexity to the system;

  9. 这场出于政治动机的运动旨在提高美国(以及其他一些经历过房地产泡沫的国家)的房屋拥有率;

  10. The politically motivated campaign to increase the home-ownership rate in the United States (and some other countries that also experienced housing bubbles); and

  11. 美国和中国之间发展出的这种不平衡关系,我和莫里茨·舒拉里克将其称为“中美关系”。

  12. The unbalanced relationship that had developed between the United States and China, which Moritz Schularick and I gave the name ‘Chimerica’.

任何对危机的描述,如果忽略危机前时期的一个或多个特征,都是不完整的。同样,任何对2009年开始的复苏的解释——特别是美国债券、股票和房地产的持续上涨以及随后的下滑——也都是不完整的。金融波动——需要涵盖金融体系的每一个组成部分。

No account of the crisis is complete that omits one or more of those features of the pre-crisis period. By the same token, any explanation of the recovery that began in 2009 – in particular, the sustained rally in US bonds, stocks and housing and the decline in financial volatility – needs to encompass each of these components of the financial system.

其次,该体系最引人注目的特点是,尽管众多银行、对冲基金和其他机构“大消亡”,大西洋两岸也颁布了数千页新的金融监管条例,但该体系在过去十年间几乎没有发生任何变化。银行的资本状况当然比十年前要好得多。然而,在其他方面,该体系却出人意料地保持着原貌。当然,也有一些新事物出现。十年前,即2008年8月,以“中本聪”(Satoshi Nakamoto)为笔名的作者在一篇论文中首次向世人介绍了“比特币”。到2017年,人们对比特币和其他加密货币的投机兴趣已经足够浓厚,足以催生一个惊人的泡沫,比特币的价格从当年1月的937美元飙升至19000美元的峰值。然而,2018年上半年的首次代币发行(ICO)所筹集的资金还不到全球证券交易所首次公开募股(IPO)所筹集资金的一半。全球金融体系仍然以银行发行的部分准备金法定货币、政府和企业发行的长期和短期债务工具、企业发行的股票、保险单和抵押贷款为主导。后危机时代最令人瞩目的金融创新或许是阿里巴巴和腾讯这两家中国互联网公司庞大的在线支付系统。

Secondly, the most striking feature of that system is how little it has changed in the space of a decade, despite the ‘great dying’ of so many banks, hedge funds and other entities, and the promulgation of thousands of pages of new financial regulation on both sides of the Atlantic. Banks are certainly better capitalized than they were ten years ago. In other respects, however, the system remains to a surprising extent unchanged. There are novelties, to be sure. Ten years ago, in August 2008, ‘Bitcoin’ was first introduced to the world in a paper published under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. By 2017 there was enough speculative interest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to produce a spectacular bubble which saw the price of one Bitcoin surge from $937 in January of that year to a peak of $19,000. Yet the initial coin offerings of the first half of 2018 raised less than half the money raised through initial public offerings of equity shares on stock exchanges around the world. Planet Finance is still dominated by fiat money created by banks with fractional reserves, long- and short-term debt instruments issued by governments and corporations, stocks issued by corporations, insurance policies and mortgages. The most impressive financial innovations of the post-crisis period may in fact be the immense online payments systems of the Chinese Internet companies Alibaba and Tencent.

如果全球金融体系自2008年以来没有发生根本性变化,这是否意味着迟早会再次爆发金融危机?答案是肯定的。金融史并未终结,正如政治史并未随着柏林墙的倒塌而结束一样。但下一次金融危机不会与上一次相同。它不会由美国次贷危机引发,也不会由资本不足的银行在全球范围内蔓延。它将有所不同,因为没有两次金融危机是完全相同的。金融史的一个重要意义就在于它教会我们这一点,它鼓励我们不要耗费太多精力去准备应对上一场危机,而是去思考一个更广泛的问题:世界各地哪些借款人过度扩张了自身债务?如果实际利率上升,它们是否会开始出现违约?如果违约数量超出预期,哪些贷款机构或投资者会陷入困境?

If the global financial system has not changed fundamentally since 2008, does that mean that there will sooner or later be another financial crisis? Yes. Financial history has not ended, any more than political history ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. But the next financial crisis will not be like the last one. It will not be triggered by defaults in US subprime mortgages, nor transmitted round the world by under-capitalized banks. It will be different because no two financial crises are ever exactly the same. An important benefit of financial history is partly that it teaches this lesson, encouraging us not to expend too much energy preparing to fight the last war, but instead to ask the broad question: which borrowers around the world have over-extended themselves to the point that they will begin to fail in the event of rising real interest rates? And which lenders or investors will be in trouble if the defaults exceed their expectations?

这些问题都有答案——而那些找到正确答案的人将比那些预见到上次危机到来,却天真地选择写一本书来描述危机的谦逊的金融史学家赚得更多。他们本可以写另一本书——对冲基金经理们经营的那种书——十年前,这种书会包含多个空头头寸,其中最大的一个就是做空雷曼兄弟。

There are answers to those questions – and those who get the right ones will make a great deal more money than the humble financial historian, who saw the last crisis coming, but naively chose to write a book about it, instead of constructing the other kind of book – the sort that hedge fund managers run – which, ten years ago, would have consisted of multiple short positions, the biggest of which would have been short Lehman Brothers.


像《金钱崛起》这样的书可以修订,但无法完全更新——至少不容易做到。因此,读者应该记住,引言和第1至7章主要是在2008年夏季之前的一年里写成的。本书的部分内容带有那个时代的印记,当时金融危机已经到来,但其严重程度、影响范围和持续时间尚不明朗。我决定保留一些现在看来有些过时的段落。然而,本序言和第8、9章是全新的,于2018年8月完成,当时正值雷曼兄弟破产十周年。接近。

A book such as The Ascent of Money can be revised but it cannot wholly be updated – at least not easily. The reader should therefore bear in mind that the introduction and Chapters 1 to 7 were largely written in the year leading up to the summer of 2008. Parts of the book bear the imprint of that time, when it was clear that a financial crisis had arrived but still unclear how severe, widespread or enduring it would be. I have taken the decision to leave intact a few paragraphs that now show their age. However, this preface and Chapters 8 and 9 are entirely new and were completed in August 2018, as the tenth anniversary of the Lehman bankruptcy was approaching.

介绍

Introduction

面包、现金、钱、钞票、战利品、财富、金钱、储备金、财力:无论你怎么称呼它,金钱都至关重要。对基督徒而言,贪财是万恶之源;对将军而言,它是战争的命脉;对革命者而言,它是劳作的枷锁。但金钱究竟是什么?它是否像西班牙征服者所认为的那样,是一座银山?还是仅仅用泥板和印刷的纸张来表示?我们是如何生活在一个大多数金钱都无形的世界里,它们只不过是电脑屏幕上的数字?金钱从何而来?又最终流向何处?

Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: call it what you like, money matters. To Christians, the love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it is the sinews of war; to revolutionaries, the shackles of labour. But what exactly is money? Is it a mountain of silver, as the Spanish conquistadors thought? Or will mere clay tablets and printed paper suffice? How did we come to live in a world where most money is invisible, little more than numbers on a computer screen? Where did money come from? And where did it all go?

2007年,美国人均收入(略低于34,000美元)增长了约5%。¹同期生活成本上涨了3.5%。因此,实际而言,普通人的生活水平仅提高了1.5%。考虑到通货膨胀因素,美国家庭收入中位数自1990年以来几乎没有变化,18年间仅增长了7%。²现在,让我们将普通人的情况与高盛首席执行官劳埃德·布兰克费恩的情况进行比较。2007年,他的薪酬、奖金和股票奖励总额为7370万美元,比上一年增长了25%,大约是普通民众收入的两千倍。同年,高盛的净收入高达460亿美元,超过了包括克罗地亚、塞尔维亚和斯洛文尼亚在内的100多个国家的国内生产总值(GDP)。玻利维亚、厄瓜多尔和危地马拉;安哥拉、叙利亚和突尼斯。该银行的总资产首次超过……突破万亿美元大关。其他三位华尔街CEO也赚得盆满钵满,虽然数额略逊一筹。据《福布斯》杂志报道,雷曼兄弟的理查德·S·富尔德收入7190万美元,摩根大通的詹姆斯·戴蒙收入2070万美元,美国银行的肯尼斯·D·刘易斯收入2010万美元,略高于花旗集团的查尔斯·O·普林斯(1990万美元)、摩根士丹利的约翰·麦克(1760万美元)和美林证券的约翰·泰恩(1580万美元)。然而,劳埃德·布兰克费恩远非2007年金融界收入最高的人。乡村金融集团的安杰洛·R·莫齐洛收入1.028亿美元。即便如此,与一些对冲基金经理的巨额收入相比,也显得微不足道。资深投机者乔治·索罗斯的收入高达29亿美元。城堡投资集团的肯·格里芬,以及另外两家顶级对冲基金的创始人,都获得了超过20亿美元的收入。 2007年美国金融界薪酬最低的CEO是贝尔斯登的詹姆斯·E·凯恩,他的年薪为690,757美元,与此前九年近2.9亿美元的收入相比,可谓大幅下降。与此同时,全球近十亿人每天的生活费仅够维持1美元

In 2007 the income of the average American (just under $34,000) went up by around 5 per cent.1 But the cost of living rose by 3.5 per cent in the same period. So in real terms Mr Average actually became just 1.5 per cent better off. Allowing for inflation, the income of the median household in the United States has in fact scarcely changed since 1990, increasing by just 7 per cent in eighteen years.2 Now compare Mr Average’s situation with that of Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive officer at Goldman Sachs, the investment bank. In 2007 he received $73.7 million in salary, bonus and stock awards, an increase of 25 per cent on the previous year, and roughly two thousand times more than Joe Public earned. That same year, Goldman Sachs’s net revenues of $46 billion exceeded the entire gross domestic product (GDP) of more than a hundred countries, including Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia; Bolivia, Ecuador and Guatemala; Angola, Syria and Tunisia. The bank’s total assets for the first time passed the $1 trillion mark.3 Other Wall Street CEOs also made serious money, though not quite so much. According to Forbes magazine, Richard S. Fuld at Lehman Brothers earned $71.9 million, James Dimon at JP Morgan Chase $20.7 million and Kenneth D. Lewis of Bank of America $20.1 million, just ahead of Charles O. Prince of Citigroup ($19.9 million), John Mack at Morgan Stanley ($17.6 million) and John Thain of Merrill Lynch ($15.8 million). Yet Lloyd Blankfein was far from being the financial world’s highest earner in 2007. Angelo R. Mozilo of Countrywide Financial was paid $102.8 million. And even that pales into insignificance alongside the vast sums earned by some hedge fund managers. The veteran speculator George Soros made $2.9 billion. Ken Griffin of Citadel, like the founders of two other leading hedge funds, took home more than $2 billion. The worst paid CEO in American finance in 2007 was James E. Cayne of Bear Stearns, who was paid $690,757, a drastic drop after the nearly $290 million he had earned over the previous nine years. Meanwhile, nearly a billion people around the world struggled to get by on just $1 a day.4

事实证明,2007年标志着自大萧条以来全球最严重的金融危机的开端。短短一年多时间里,一系列事件彻底粉碎了“金融家们的高额薪酬是因其卓越的技能,尤其是在风险管理领域,而合理化”的说法。在我修订本书平装版时,贝尔斯登已被摩根大通从破产边缘拯救出来,Countrywide已被美国银行收购,美林证券也遭遇了同样的命运,而雷曼兄弟则彻底破产。花旗集团2008年亏损187亿美元,几乎抹去了自2005年以来的所有盈利;美林证券亏损358亿美元,抹去了自1996年以来的所有盈利。高盛和摩根士丹利都被迫从投资银行转型为银行控股公司,这标志着一种可以追溯到20世纪30年代的商业模式的终结。所有幸存的银行都接受了美国财政部根据“问题资产救助计划”(TARPA)注入的资金。尽管政府提供了援助,但它们的股价仍持续下滑,至少部分公司面临被彻底国有化的风险。例如,到2009年2月,花旗集团的股价已从2007年6月的55美元跌至1.49美元。

As it turned out, 2007 saw the start of the worst financial crisis the world has experienced since the Great Depression. In the space of a little more than a year, events occurred that made a mockery of the claim that the lavish compensation paid to financiers was justified by their exceptional skills, particularly in the realm of risk management. By the time I came to revise this book for its paperback edition, Bear Stearns had been rescued from collapse by JP Morgan, Countrywide had been taken over by Bank of America, Merrill Lynch had suffered the same fate and Lehman Brothers had gone bust. Citigroup had lost $18.7 billion in 2008, wiping out most of its earnings since 2005, while Merrill Lynch had lost $35.8 billion, wiping out its earnings since 1996. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley had both been forced to convert themselves from investment banks into bank holding companies, signaling the death of a business model that dated back to the 1930s. All the surviving banks had accepted capital injections from the US Treasury under the Troubled Asset Relief Programme. Despite government assistance, however, their share prices continued to slide, raising the prospect of outright nationalization for at least some of them. By February 2009, shares in Citigroup, for example, had fallen from $55 in June 2007 to $1.49.

你是否对世界的不公感到愤怒?是否对那些腰缠万贯的资本家和拿着亿万奖金的银行家感到愤慨?是否对富人、穷人和游艇富豪之间巨大的鸿沟感到困惑?你并不孤单。纵观西方文明史,人们对金融和金融家一直抱有敌意,这种敌意源于一种观念:那些靠放贷为生的人,某种程度上寄生于农业和制造业等“真正”的经济活动之上。这种敌意有三个原因。一方面,债务人往往多于债权人,而债务人很少对债权人抱有好感。另一方面,金融危机和丑闻频发,使得金融看起来像是贫困而非繁荣、动荡而非稳定的根源。部分原因是,几个世纪以来,世界各国的金融服务不成比例地由少数族裔或宗教群体成员提供,他们被排除在土地所有权或公职之外,但由于他们自身紧密的亲属和信任网络,在金融领域取得了成功。

Are you angry that the world is so unfair? Infuriated by fat-cat capitalists and billion-bonus bankers? Baffled by the yawning chasm between the Haves, the Have-nots – and the Have-yachts? You are not alone. Throughout the history of Western civilization, there has been a recurrent hostility to finance and financiers, rooted in the idea that those who make their living from lending money are somehow parasitical on the ‘real’ economic activities of agriculture and manufacturing. This hostility has three causes. It is partly because debtors have tended to outnumber creditors and the former have seldom felt very well disposed towards the latter. It is partly because financial crises and scandals occur frequently enough to make finance appear to be a cause of poverty rather than prosperity, volatility rather than stability. And it is partly because, for centuries, financial services in countries all over the world were disproportionately provided by members of ethnic or religious minorities, who had been excluded from land ownership or public office but enjoyed success in finance because of their own tight-knit networks of kinship and trust.

尽管我们对“不义之财”根深蒂固地抱有偏见,但金钱却是大多数进步的根源。借用雅各布·布罗诺夫斯基(我学生时代曾如饥似渴地观看他精彩的科学进步电视史)的一句话,金钱的崛起对人类的崛起至关重要。金融创新远非那些一心只想榨取负债家庭血汗或挥霍寡妇孤儿积蓄的寄生虫所为,而是人类从赤贫挣扎走向如今许多人所熟知的物质繁荣的不可或缺的因素。从古巴比伦到今天的香港,信贷和债务的演变在文明的兴起过程中,其重要性不亚于任何一项技术创新。银行和债券市场为意大利文艺复兴的辉煌提供了物质基础。企业金融是荷兰和英国帝国不可或缺的基石,正如美国在二十世纪的崛起离不开保险、抵押贷款和消费信贷的进步一样。或许,也正是这场金融危机,预示着美国全球霸权的终结。

Despite our deeply rooted prejudices against ‘filthy lucre’, however, money is the root of most progress. To adapt a phrase from Jacob Bronowski (whose marvellous television history of scientific progress I watched avidly as a schoolboy), the ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man. Far from being the work of mere leeches intent on sucking the life’s blood out of indebted families or gambling with the savings of widows and orphans, financial innovation has been an indispensable factor in man’s advance from wretched subsistence to the giddy heights of material prosperity that so many people know today. The evolution of credit and debt was as important as any technological innovation in the rise of civilization, from ancient Babylon to present-day Hong Kong. Banks and the bond market provided the material basis for the splendours of the Italian Renaissance. Corporate finance was the indispensable foundation of both the Dutch and British empires, just as the triumph of the United States in the twentieth century was inseparable from advances in insurance, mortgage finance and consumer credit. Perhaps, too, it will be a financial crisis that signals the twilight of American global primacy.

每一个伟大的历史现象背后都隐藏着一个金融秘密,本书旨在揭示其中最重要的几个。例如,文艺复兴时期艺术和建筑市场的繁荣,正是因为像美第奇家族这样的意大利银行家运用东方数学方法积累了巨额财富。荷兰共和国之所以能够战胜哈布斯堡王朝,是因为拥有世界上第一个现代股票市场在经济上比拥有世界上最大的银矿更有优势。法国君主制的问题最终无法通过革命解决,是因为一位被定罪的苏格兰谋杀犯通过引发第一次股市泡沫和崩盘,摧毁了法国的金融体系。在滑铁卢战役中,击败拿破仑的不仅是威灵顿公爵,还有内森·罗斯柴尔德。正是金融上的愚蠢行为,以及违约和贬值带来的自我毁灭循环,使得阿根廷从19世纪80年代的世界第六富裕国家沦落到20世纪80年代饱受通货膨胀折磨的烂摊子。

Behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret, and this book sets out to illuminate the most important of these. For example, the Renaissance created such a boom in the market for art and architecture because Italian bankers like the Medici made fortunes by applying Oriental mathematics to money. The Dutch Republic prevailed over the Habsburg Empire because having the world’s first modern stock market was financially preferable to having the world’s biggest silver mine. The problems of the French monarchy could not be resolved without a revolution because a convicted Scots murderer had wrecked the French financial system by unleashing the first stock market bubble and bust. It was Nathan Rothschild as much as the Duke of Wellington who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. It was financial folly, a self-destructive cycle of defaults and devaluations, that turned Argentina from the world’s sixth-richest country in the 1880s into the inflation-ridden basket case of the 1980s.

读完这本书,你就会明白,为何看似矛盾的是,世界上最安全国家的居民同时也是世界上投保率最高的人。你还会发现,英语国家的人们何时以及为何对买卖房屋产生了如此独特的痴迷。或许最重要的是,你会看到,金融全球化在诸多方面模糊了发达市场和新兴市场之间的传统界限,使中国变成了美国的银行家——从共产主义债权国变成了资本主义债务国,这是一个具有划时代意义的转变。

Read this book and you will understand why, paradoxically, the people who live in the world’s safest country are also the world’s most insured. You will discover when and why the English-speaking peoples developed their peculiar obsession with buying and selling houses. Perhaps most importantly, you will see how the globalization of finance has, among many other things, blurred the old distinction between developed and emerging markets, turning China into America’s banker – the Communist creditor to the capitalist debtor, a change of epochal significance.

有时,金钱的增长似乎势不可挡。2006年,全球经济产出约为48.6万亿美元。全球股市总市值达到50.6万亿美元,增长了4%。国内外债券总值达到67.9万亿美元,增长了40%。规模扩大了百分之几。金融星球的规模开始远超地球。而且,金融星球的运转速度似乎也更快了。每天,外汇市场上的资金流动高达3.1万亿美元。每月,全球股市的资金流动高达5.8万亿美元。每一天、每一小时、每一周,总有人在进行交易。与此同时,新的金融形式也在不断涌现。例如,2006年,杠杆收购(通过借贷融资收购公司)的规模飙升至7530亿美元。证券化浪潮——即将抵押贷款等个人债务“分层”,然后打包重新包装出售——推动抵押贷款支持证券、资产支持证券和担保债务凭证的年度发行​​总额超过3万亿美元。衍生品——即基于现有证券或交易衍生的合约,例如利率互换或信用违约互换(CDS)——的交易量增长速度更快,到2006年底,所有场外衍生品(不包括在公开交易所交易的衍生品)的名义价值已超过400万亿美元。在20世纪80年代之前,这类产品几乎闻所未闻。新的机构也如雨后春笋般涌现。第一家对冲基金成立于20世纪40年代,直到1990年,对冲基金的数量也只有610家,管理资产规模为389亿美元。而到2006年底,对冲基金的数量已增至9462家,管理资产规模达1.5万亿美元。私募股权合伙企业也蓬勃发展,数量激增。与此同时,银行设立了大量的“导管”和“结构化投资工具”(SIV——这无疑是金融史上最贴切的缩写),以将潜在风险资产从其资产负债表中剥离出来。仿佛整个影子银行体系已经形成。如果说过去四千年见证了人类作为思想家的崛起,那么我们现在似乎正在经历人类作为银行家的崛起。

At times, the ascent of money has seemed inexorable. In 2006 the measured economic output of the entire world was around $48.6 trillion. The total market capitalization of the world’s stock markets was $50.6 trillion, 4 per cent larger. The total value of domestic and international bonds was $67.9 trillion, 40 per cent larger. Planet Finance was beginning to dwarf Planet Earth. And Planet Finance seemed to spin faster, too. Every day $3.1 trillion changed hands on foreign exchange markets. Every month $5.8 trillion changed hands on global stock markets. Every minute of every hour of every day of every week, someone, somewhere, was trading. And all the time new financial life forms were evolving. In 2006, for example, the volume of leveraged buyouts (takeovers of firms financed by borrowing) surged to $753 billion. An explosion of ‘securitization’, whereby individual debts like mortgages are ‘tranched’ then bundled together and repackaged for sale, pushed the total annual issuance of mortgage- backed securities, asset-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations above $3 trillion. The volume of derivatives – contracts derived from existing securities or transactions, such as interest rate swaps or credit default swaps (CDS) – has grown even faster, so that by the end of 2006 the notional value of all ‘over-the-counter’ derivatives (excluding those traded on public exchanges) was just over $400 trillion. Before the 1980s, such things were virtually unknown. New institutions, too, proliferated. The first hedge fund was set up in the 1940s and, as recently as 1990, there were just 610 of them, with $38.9 billion under management. At the end of 2006 there were 9,462, with $1.5 trillion under management. Private equity partnerships also went forth and multiplied. Banks, meanwhile, set up a host of ‘conduits’ and ‘structured investment vehicles’ (SIVS – surely the most apt acronym in financial history) to keep potentially risky assets off their balance sheets. It was as if an entire shadow banking system had come into being. If the last four millennia had witnessed the ascent of man the thinker, we now seemed to be living through the ascent of man the banker.

1947年,金融业对美国国内生产总值(GDP)的贡献率为2.3%;到2007年,这一比例上升至GDP的8.1%。换句话说,当时美国员工每13美元的收入中,大约有1美元流向了金融从业人员。⁵金融业在英国的重要性甚至更高,占GDP的9.4%。2006年,金融业也成为了全球最具吸引力的学术人才聚集地。早在1970年,我任教的哈佛大学毕业生中,只有约5%的人进入金融行业。到1990年,这一比例上升至15%。*到2007年,这一比例甚至更高。据《哈佛深红报》报道,2007届毕业生中,超过20%的男生和10%的女生预计他们的第一份工作将在银行。谁又能责怪他们呢?近年来,金融行业的薪酬几乎是常春藤盟校毕业生在其他经济领域收入的三倍。

In 1947 the total value added by the financial sector to US gross domestic product was 2.3 per cent; by 2007 its contribution had risen to 8.1 per cent of GDP. In other words, approximately $1 of every $13 paid to employees in the United States now went to people working in finance.5 Finance had become even more important in Britain, where it accounted for 9.4 per cent of GDP in 2006. The financial sector had also become the most powerful magnet in the world for academic talent. Back in 1970 only around 5 per cent of the men graduating from Harvard, where I teach, went into finance. By 1990 that figure had risen to 15 per cent.* By 2007 the proportion was even higher. According to the Harvard Crimson, more than 20 per cent of the men in the Class of 2007, and 10 per cent of the women, expected their first jobs to be at banks. And who could blame them? In recent years, the pay packages in finance had been nearly three times the salaries earned by Ivy League graduates in other sectors of the economy.

2007届毕业生毕业时,全球金融的持续繁荣似乎势不可挡。纽约和伦敦的恐怖袭击、中东的战火纷飞、全球气候变化,都未能阻挡其发展。尽管经历了世界贸易中心的毁灭、阿富汗和伊拉克战争以及极端气象事件的频发,从2001年末到2007年中期,金融市场依然保持着持续扩张的态势。诚然,在9·11事件发生后,道琼斯工业平均指数一度下跌了14%。然而,仅仅两个多月后,它就恢复到了9·11事件前的水平。此外,尽管2002年对美国股票投资者来说是令人失望的一年,但此后市场一路飙升,并在2006年秋季超过了此前的峰值(即互联网泡沫鼎盛时期)。到2007年10月初,道琼斯指数几乎是五年前低谷时期的两倍。美国股市的表现也并非异常出色。截至2007年7月31日的五年间,除两个市场外,全球所有股票市场的年化收益率均达到两位数。新兴市场债券也强劲上涨,房地产市场,尤其是在英语国家,更是实现了显著的资本增值。无论投资者将资金投入大宗商品、艺术品、年份葡萄酒还是其他类型的资产支持证券,他们都从中获利。

At the time the Class of 2007 graduated, it certainly seemed as if nothing could halt the rise and rise of global finance. Not terrorist attacks on New York and London. Not raging war in the Middle East. Certainly not global climate change. Despite the destruction of the World Trade Center, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and a spike in extreme meteorological events, the period from late 2001 until mid-2007 was characterized by sustained financial expansion. True, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had declined by as much as 14 per cent. Within just over two months, however, it had regained its pre-9/11 level. Moreover, although 2002 was a disappointing year for US equity investors, the market surged ahead thereafter, exceeding its previous peak (at the height of the ‘dot com’ mania) in the autumn of 2006. By early October 2007 the Dow stood at nearly double the level it had reached in the trough of five years before. Nor was the US stock market’s performance exceptional. In the five years to 31 July 2007, all but two of the world’s equity markets delivered double-digit returns on an annualized basis. Emerging market bonds also rose strongly and real estate markets, especially in the English-speaking world, saw remarkable capital appreciation. Whether they put their money into commodities, works of art, vintage wine or exotic asset-backed securities, investors made money.

这些奇迹该如何解释?一种观点认为,最新的金融创新从根本上提高了全球资本市场的效率,使风险能够分配给最能承受风险的人。狂热者们宣称波动性已经消亡。自鸣得意的银行家们举办了诸如“卓越的演进”之类的会议。2006年11月,我参加了在巴哈马群岛莱福德礁举办的一场此类会议,那里一如既往地奢华。我的演讲主题是,当时席卷全球金融体系的流动性急剧下降,而我们不应指望好日子会无限期地持续下去。我的听众显然不以为然。我被斥为危言耸听。一位经验最丰富的投资者甚至建议组织者“明年干脆取消邀请外部演讲嘉宾,改放映《欢乐满人间》”。6然而,提到《欢乐满人间》却唤起了我童年的一段回忆。朱莉·安德鲁斯的影迷或许还记得,这部经久不衰的音乐剧的情节围绕着一场金融事件展开,而这场事件在20世纪60年代电影拍摄时就已经显得有些古怪了:银行挤兑——也就是储户争相取款——这种事自1866年以来在伦敦就再也没有发生过。

How were these wonders to be explained? According to one school of thought, the latest financial innovations had brought about a fundamental improvement in the efficiency of the global capital market, allowing risk to be allocated to those best able to bear it. Enthusiasts spoke of the death of volatility. Self-satisfied bankers held conferences with titles like ‘The Evolution of Excellence’. In November 2006 I found myself at one such conference in the characteristically luxurious venue of Lyford Cay in the Bahamas. The theme of my speech was that it would not take much to cause a drastic decline in the liquidity that was then cascading through the global financial system and that we should be cautious about expecting the good times to last indefinitely. My audience was distinctly unimpressed. I was dismissed as an alarmist. One of the most experienced investors there went so far as to suggest to the organizers that they ‘dispense altogether with an outside speaker next year, and instead offer a screening of Mary Poppins’.6 Yet the mention of Mary Poppins stirred a childhood memory in me. Julie Andrews fans may recall that the plot of the evergreen musical revolves around a financial event which, when the film was made in the 1960s, already seemed quaint: a bank run – that is, a rush by depositors to withdraw their money – something not seen in London since 1866.

雇佣玛丽·波平斯的这家人姓班克斯,这并非巧合。班克斯先生的确是一位银行家,是道斯、托姆斯、穆斯利、格拉布斯、富达信托银行的高级职员。在他的坚持下,班克斯家的孩子们有一天被新来的保姆带到他的银行。在那里,老道斯先生建议班克斯先生的儿子迈克尔把零花钱(两便士)存进去。不幸的是,小迈克尔更喜欢把钱花在银行外面喂鸽子上,并要求道斯先生“还给我!把我的钱还给我!”更糟糕的是,银行的其他一些客户听到了迈克尔的要求。结果,他们开始取款。很快,一大批账户持有人也这样做,迫使银行暂停支付。班克斯先生因此被解雇,引发了人们悲叹他“落得个悲惨的下场”。“他的巅峰时期”。这句话或许也适用于英国北方银行前首席执行官亚当·阿普尔加思,他在2007年9月也遭遇了类似的命运,当时客户在他的银行网点外排起了长队,等待取款。此前,北方银行宣布已向英格兰银行申请“流动性支持”。

The family that employs Mary Poppins is, not accidentally, named Banks. Mr Banks is indeed a banker, a senior employee of the Dawes, Tomes Mousley, Grubbs, Fidelity Fiduciary Bank. At his insistence, the Banks children are one day taken by their new nanny to visit his bank, where Mr Dawes Sr. recommends that Mr Banks’s son Michael deposit his pocket-money (tuppence). Unfortunately, young Michael prefers to spend the money on feeding the pigeons outside the bank, and demands that Mr Dawes ‘Give it back! Gimme back my money!’ Even more unfortunately, some of the bank’s other clients overhear Michael’s request. The result is that they begin to withdraw their money. Soon a horde of account holders are doing the same, forcing the bank to suspend payments. Mr Banks is duly sacked, prompting the tragic lament that he has been ‘brought to wrack and ruin in his prime’. These words might legitimately have been echoed by Adam Applegarth, the former chief executive of the English bank Northern Rock, who suffered a similar fate in September 2007 as customers queued outside his bank’s branches to withdraw their cash. This followed the announcement that Northern Rock had requested a ‘liquidity support facility’ from the Bank of England.

2007年夏天席卷西方世界的金融危机,恰逢其时地提醒我们金融史上一个永恒的真理:泡沫终将破裂;空头迟早会超过多头;贪婪终将转化为恐惧。2008年初,当我完成本书的研究工作时,美国经济可能陷入衰退已成定局。一年后,当我为平装版修订这篇导言时,美国经济显然正遭受自20世纪80年代初以来最严重的衰退,而且极有可能陷入长期萧条。这是否是因为美国公司在新产品设计方面能力下降?技术创新的步伐是否突然放缓?都不是。2008-2009年经济萎缩的直接原因是金融问题:更确切地说,是信贷体系的崩溃,而这场崩溃是由一种被委婉地称为“次级抵押贷款”的债务违约率不断攀升引发的。我们的全球金融体系已经变得如此错综复杂,以至于从阿拉巴马州到威斯康星州等地的相对贫困家庭,都能通过往往复杂的贷款购买或重新抵押房屋。而这些贷款(他们毫不知情)随后被与其他类似的贷款打包在一起,重新包装成担保债务凭证(CDO),并由纽约和伦敦的银行出售给(包括)德国地方银行和挪威市政当局等机构,这些机构由此成为实际的抵押贷款方。这些CDO被分割得如此精细,以至于有人声称,来自原始借款人的部分利息收入与十年期美国国债的利息一样可靠,因此值得获得令人垂涎的AAA评级。这简直是将金融炼金术推向了一个新的高度,仿佛点石成金。

The financial crisis that struck the Western world in the summer of 2007 provided a timely reminder of one of the perennial truths of financial history. Sooner or later every bubble bursts. Sooner or later the bearish sellers outnumber the bullish buyers. Sooner or later greed turns to fear. As I completed my research for this book in the early months of 2008, it was already a distinct possibility that the US economy might suffer a recession. A year later, as I revised this introduction for the paperback edition, it was now clearly suffering the most serious recession since the early 1980s, with a significant probability of a protracted depression. Was this because American companies had got worse at designing new products? Had the pace of technological innovation suddenly slackened? No. The proximate cause of the economic contraction of 2008–9 was financial: to be precise, a spasm in the credit system precipitated by mounting defaults on a species of debt known euphemistically as subprime mortgages. So intricate had our global financial system become, that relatively poor families in states from Alabama to Wisconsin had been able to buy or remortgage their homes with often complex loans that (unbeknown to them) were then bundled together with other, similar loans, repackaged as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and sold by banks in New York and London to (among others) German regional banks and Norwegian municipal authorities, who thereby became the effective mortgage lenders. These CDOs had been so sliced and diced that it was possible to claim that a tier of the interest payments from the original borrowers was as dependable a stream of income as the interest on a ten-year US Treasury bond, and therefore worthy of a coveted triple-A rating. This took financial alchemy to a new level of sophistication, apparently turning lead into gold.

然而,当最初的抵押贷款在为期一到两年的“诱导期”结束后,利率重置为更高的水平时,借款人开始拖欠还款。这反过来又表明美国房地产泡沫正在破裂,引发了自20世纪30年代以来最严重的房价下跌。随后发生的一切如同缓慢但最终具有毁灭性的连锁反应。各种资产支持证券,包括许多实际上并非由次级抵押贷款支持的工具,价值暴跌。银行设立的旨在将这些证券从银行资产负债表中剥离出来的机构,例如导管和结构化投资工具,发现自己陷入了严重的困境。随着银行接管这些证券,其资本与资产的比率急剧下降。美国和欧洲的中央银行试图通过降息和通过特殊的“定期拍卖机制”提供贷款来缓解银行的压力。然而,银行的借款利率,无论是发行商业票据、出售债券还是相互借贷,都远高于官方的联邦基金目标利率,即美国经济的最低贷款利率。原本用于私募股权合伙企业收购公司的贷款,即便能够出售,也只能以大幅折扣价出售。遭受巨额损失后,许多知名的欧美银行不仅不得不向西方央行寻求短期援助以重建储备,还不得不向亚洲和中东的主权财富基金注资以重建资本基础。但到了2008年初,外国投资者对持续下跌的银行股失去了兴趣。

However, when the original mortgages reset at higher interest rates after their one- or two-year ‘teaser’ periods expired, the borrowers began to default on their payments. This in turn signalled that the bubble in US real estate was bursting, triggering the sharpest fall in house prices since the 1930s. What followed resembled a slow but ultimately devastating chain reaction. All kinds of asset-backed securities, including many instruments not in fact backed with subprime mortgages, slumped in value. Institutions like conduits and structured investment vehicles, which had been set up by banks to hold these securities off the banks’ balance sheets, found themselves in severe difficulties. As the banks took over the securities, the ratios between their capital and their assets lurched downwards. Central banks in the United States and Europe sought to alleviate the pressure on the banks with interest rate cuts and offers of loans through special ‘term auction facilities’. Yet the rates at which banks could borrow money, whether by issuing commercial paper, selling bonds or borrowing from each other, remained substantially above the official federal funds target rate, the minimum lending rate in the US economy. Loans that were originally intended to finance purchases of corporations by private equity partnerships were also only saleable, if at all, at large discounts. Having suffered enormous losses, many of the best-known American and European banks had to turn not only to Western central banks for short-term assistance to rebuild their reserves but also to Asian and Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds for equity injections in order to rebuild their capital bases. But by early 2008 foreign investors were losing their appetite for bank stocks that persistently declined in price.

回首往事,从次贷危机到全面爆发的全球金融危机的转变似乎是一个缓慢的过程。尽管美国房地产价格早在2007年1月就开始下跌,但股市却持续上涨至同年11月。即使到了2008年5月,标准普尔500指数也仅比前一年10月的峰值下跌了10%。尽管美国国家经济研究局宣布经济衰退已经开始,但股市并未持续上涨。2007 年 12 月,美国消费者极度否认现实,直到 2008 年第三季度才开始减少支出。而直到 2008 年 9 月这个具有决定性意义的月份之后,“大萧条”才结束,美国的危机演变成一场全面的全球化危机,导致亚洲和欧洲经济体的出口急剧下降,并戳破了大宗商品价格泡沫,当时石油价格曾超过每桶 133 美元。

In retrospect, the transition from a subprime mortgage crisis to a full-blown global financial crisis seemed to happen in slow motion. Although American real estate prices had begun to decline as early as January 2007, the stock market continued to rise until November of that year. Even in May 2008 the Standard and Poor’s 500 index was still only 10 per cent down from the previous October’s peak. Although the National Bureau of Economic Research pronounced that a recession had begun in December 2007, American consumers were so deeply in denial that they did not reduce their spending until the third quarter of 2008. And it was not until after the fateful month of September 2008 that the ‘Great Repression’ ended and the American crisis mutated into a full-blown crisis of globalization, causing dramatic declines in the exports of Asian and European economies, as well as bursting the bubble in commodity prices that had seen oil fetching more than $133 a barrel.

这究竟是怎么回事?年收入数千万美元的人怎么会损失数百亿美元?共和党政府怎么会最终将联邦国民抵押贷款协会、联邦住房贷款抵押公司和保险巨头美国国际集团国有化?最重要的是,美国抵押贷款市场的危机怎么会引发的不仅仅是美国经济衰退,甚至很可能是一场全球性大萧条?要回答这些问题,你需要了解至少六个既独立又相互关联的金融现象:

How on earth did this happen? How could men earning tens of millions end up losing tens of billions? How could a Republican administration end up nationalizing the Federal National Mortgage Association, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation and the insurance giant American International Group? Above all, how could a crisis in the American mortgage market precipitate not just an American recession but quite possibly a world depression? To answer these questions you need to understand at least six distinct though interrelated financial phenomena:

  1. 换句话说,为什么这么多美国和欧洲银行的资产负债表杠杆率如此之高?也就是说,为什么它们的负债和贷款额远远超过了它们的基本资本基础?

  2. How so many American and European banks came to have such highly leveraged balance sheets, in other words how they ended up owing and lending so much more money than their underlying capital bases;

  3. 包括抵押贷款债务和信用卡债务在内的各种不同类型债务是如何被“证券化”的,即将这些债务打包在一起,然后分割成不同类型的债券状证券;

  4. How a whole range of different kinds of debt, including mortgage debt as well as credit card debt, came to be ‘securitized’, that is bundled together and then sliced up into different kinds of bond-like securities;

  5. 中央银行的货币政策是如何逐渐聚焦于非常狭隘的通货膨胀定义,而忽略了股票价格泡沫以及后来的房地产价格泡沫的潜在风险;

  6. How the monetary policies of central banks came to be focused on a very narrow definition of inflation, ignoring the potential hazards of bubbles in stock prices and later real estate prices;

  7. 以美国巨头 AIG 为首的保险业如何从传统的风险保障扩展到衍生品市场,有效地销售针对高度不确定金融风险的保障;

  8. How the insurance industry, led by the giant American firm AIG, branched out of traditional risk coverage into the market for derivatives, effectively selling protection against highly uncertain financial risks;

  9. 为什么大西洋两岸的政治家都试图通过各种激励措施来扩大抵押贷款市场,从而提高家庭自有住房的比例?

  10. Why politicians on both sides of the Atlantic sought to increase the percentage of households that owned their own homes, using a variety of inducements to widen the mortgage market; and

  11. 是什么说服了亚洲各国政府,特别是中华人民共和国政府,让他们相信应该通过积累数万亿美元的国际储备来帮助美国弥补经常账户赤字?

  12. What persuaded Asian governments, and particularly that of the People’s Republic of China, that they should help to finance the US current account deficit by accumulating trillions of dollars in international reserves.

对某些读者来说,这一切或许显得晦涩难懂。然而,银行资本与资产的比率,尽管听起来很专业,但其意义远不止于学术层面。毕竟,美国银行体系的“大收缩”已被公认为1929年至1933年间爆发并持续至今的大萧条的罪魁祸首,而这场大萧条是现代史上最严重的经济灾难。因此,本书的目的之一便是为普通读者提供金融,特别是金融史的入门知识。毕竟,英语世界相当一部分公众对金融一无所知,这已是不争的事实。根据2007年的一项调查,尽管信用卡公司收取高额利息,但十分之四的美国信用卡持卡人并未按时全额偿还他们最常用信用卡的欠款。近三分之一(29%)的人表示,他们根本不知道自己信用卡的利率是多少。另有30%的人声称利率低于10%,但实际上绝大多数信用卡公司收取的利率都远高于10%。超过一半的受访者表示,他们在学校“没学到多少”或“根本没学到”金融知识。 8 2008年的一项调查显示,三分之二的美国人不了解复利的运作原理。 9布法罗大学管理学院的研究人员进行的一项调查显示,一组典型的高中毕业生在回答一系列关于个人理财和经济学的问题时,得分仅为52%。10只有14%的人理解股票价格会趋于……在18年期限内,其收益高于美国政府债券。不到23%的人知道,如果账户持有人的收入足够高,储蓄账户的利息收入需要缴纳所得税。高达59%的人不知道公司养老金、社会保障和401(k)计划之间的区别。*

All of this may seem arcane to some readers. Yet the ratio of a bank’s capital to its assets, technical though it may sound, is of more than merely academic interest. After all, a ‘great contraction’ in the US banking system has convincingly been blamed for the outbreak and course of the Great Depression between 1929 and 1933, the worst economic disaster of modern history.7 One purpose of this book, then, is to offer the lay reader an introduction to finance and, in particular, to financial history. It is a well-established fact, after all, that a substantial proportion of the general public in the English-speaking world is ignorant of finance. According to one 2007 survey, four in ten American credit card holders do not pay the full amount due every month on the card they use most often, despite the punitively high interest rates charged by credit card companies. Nearly a third (29 per cent) said they had no idea what the interest rate on their card was. Another 30 per cent claimed that it was below 10 per cent, when in reality the overwhelming majority of card companies charge substantially in excess of 10 per cent. More than half of the respondents said they had learned ‘not too much’ or ‘nothing at all’ about financial issues at school.8 A 2008 survey revealed that two thirds of Americans did not understand how compound interest worked.9 In one survey conducted by researchers at the University of Buffalo’s School of Management, a typical group of high school seniors scored just 52 per cent in response to a set of questions about personal finance and economics.10 Only 14 per cent understood that stocks would tend to generate a higher return over eighteen years than a US government bond. Less than 23 per cent knew that income tax is charged on the interest earned from a savings account if the account holder’s income is high enough. Fully 59 per cent did not know the difference between a company pension, Social Security and a 401(k) plan.*

这并非美国独有的现象。2006年,英国金融服务管理局进行了一项公众金融素养调查,结果显示,五分之一的受访者不知道5%的通货膨胀率和3%的利率会对他们储蓄的购买力产生什么影响。十分之一的受访者不知道一台原价250英镑的电视机,打30英镑的折扣和打九折哪个更划算。正如这个例子所示,这些调查中提出的问题都非常基础。例如,可以合理推断,只有极少数受访者能够解释“看跌期权”和“看涨期权”之间的区别,更不用说CDO和CDS之间的区别了。

Nor is this a uniquely American phenomenon. In 2006, the British Financial Services Authority carried out a survey of public financial literacy which revealed that one person in five had no idea what the effect would be on the purchasing power of their savings of an inflation rate of 5 per cent and an interest rate of 3 per cent. One in ten did not know which was the better discount for a television originally priced at £250: £30 or 10 per cent. As that example makes clear, the questions posed in these surveys were of the most basic nature. It seems reasonable to assume that only a handful of those polled would have been able to explain the difference between a ‘put’ and a ‘call’ option, for example, much less the difference between a CDO and a CDS.

政客、央行行长和商界人士经常感叹公众对金钱的无知,这并非没有道理。一个社会如果期望大多数个人负责管理税后收支,期望大多数成年人拥有自己的住房,并让个人自行决定退休储蓄多少以及是否购买医疗保险,那么,如果公民缺乏做出明智财务决策的能力,无疑会为未来埋下隐患。事实上,我认为,当今的危机在某种程度上可以归因于人们对金融史的无知——而且这种无知不仅仅存在于普通民众之中。“宇宙的主宰者”们也对金融史的教训重视不足。过去,他们宁愿把希望寄托在复杂的数学模型上,而这些模型最终被证明是虚假的。

Politicians, central bankers and businessmen regularly lament the extent of public ignorance about money, and with good reason. A society that expects most individuals to take responsibility for the management of their own expenditure and income after tax, that expects most adults to own their own homes and that leaves it to the individual to determine how much to save for retirement and whether or not to take out health insurance, is surely storing up trouble for the future by leaving its citizens so ill-equipped to make wise financial decisions. Indeed, I believe that today’s crisis is in some measure to be explained by ignorance of financial history – and not only among ordinary people. The ‘masters of the universe’ also paid far too little heed to the lessons of the past, preferring to pin their hopes on elaborate mathematical models that proved to be false gods.

要理解现代金融机构和术语的复杂性,首先要探究它们的起源。只有了解了某个机构或工具的起源,才能更容易理解它如今的作用。因此,本书按顺序介绍了现代金融体系的关键组成部分。第一章追溯了货币和信贷的兴起;第二章讲述了债券市场;第三章讲述了股票市场。第四章讲述了保险业的发展历程;第五章讲述了房地产市场;第六章讲述了国际金融的兴衰。每一章都探讨了一个关键的历史问题。货币何时从金属演变为纸币,最终彻底消失?债券市场真的能够通过设定长期利率来主宰世界吗?中央银行在股市泡沫和崩盘中扮演着怎样的角色?为什么保险未必是规避风险的最佳方式?人们是否夸大了投资房地产的收益?中美经济相互依存是全球金融稳定的关键,还是仅仅是一个美好的幻想?

The first step towards understanding the complexities of modern financial institutions and terminology is to find out where they came from. Only understand the origins of an institution or instrument and you will find its present-day role much easier to grasp. Accordingly, the key components of the modern financial system are introduced sequentially. The first chapter of this book traces the rise of money and credit; the second the bond market; the third the stock market. Chapter 4 tells the story of insurance; Chapter 5 the real estate market; and Chapter 6 the rise, fall and rise of international finance. Each chapter addresses a key historical question. When did money stop being metal and mutate into paper, before vanishing altogether? Is it true that, by setting long-term interest rates, the bond market rules the world? What is the role played by central banks in stock market bubbles and busts? Why is insurance not necessarily the best way to protect yourself from risk? Do people exaggerate the benefits of investing in real estate? And is the economic interdependence of China and America the key to global financial stability, or a mere chimera?

试图涵盖从古代美索不达米亚到现代小额信贷的金融史,无疑是一项不可能完成的任务。为了简洁明了,很多内容不得不省略。然而,如果能够帮助普通读者更清晰地了解现代金融体系,那么这项尝试就值得去做。

In trying to cover the history of finance from ancient Mesopotamia to modern microfinance, I have set myself an impossible task, no doubt. Much must be omitted in the interests of brevity and simplicity. Yet the attempt seems worth making if it can bring the modern financial system into sharper focus in the mind’s eye of the general reader.

在撰写本书的过程中,我本人也受益匪浅,其中有三点尤为突出。首先,贫困并非贪婪的金融家剥削穷人的结果,而是更多地源于金融机构的匮乏,源于银行的缺失,而非银行的存在。只有当借款人能够获得高效的信贷网络时,他们才能摆脱高利贷者的魔爪;只有当储户能够将资金存入可靠的银行时,资金才能从闲散者流向勤劳者,从富人流向穷人。这一点不仅适用于世界上的贫困国家,也适用于……在一些所谓的发达国家,最贫困的社区——“内部的非洲”——比如我的出生地格拉斯哥的住宅区,有些人每天只靠 6 英镑勉强糊口,从牙膏到交通,所有东西都要花这笔钱,但当地高利贷者收取的年利率却可能超过 1100 万%。

I myself have learned a great deal in writing this book, but three insights in particular stand out. The first is that poverty is not the result of rapacious financiers exploiting the poor. It has much more to do with the lack of financial institutions, with the absence of banks, not their presence. Only when borrowers have access to efficient credit networks can they escape from the clutches of loan sharks, and only when savers can deposit their money in reliable banks can it be channelled from the idle to the industrious or from the rich to the poor. This point applies not just to the poor countries of the world. It can also be said of the poorest neighbourhoods in supposedly developed countries – the ‘Africas within’ – like the housing estates of my birthplace, Glasgow, where some people are scraping by on just £6 a day, for everything from toothpaste to transport, but where the interest rates charged by local loan sharks can be over eleven million per cent a year.

我的第二个重大领悟与平等及其缺失有关。如果说金融体系存在缺陷,那就是它反映并放大了我们人类的本性。正如我们从行为金融领域日益增多的研究中了解到的那样,金钱会放大我们过度反应的倾向,使我们在顺境时欣喜若狂,在逆境时陷入深深的沮丧。经济繁荣与萧条的根源在于我们情绪的波动。但金融也加剧了人与人之间的差异,使幸运和聪明的人致富,使不幸和不够聪明的人陷入贫困。金融全球化意味着,经过三百多年的分化,世界不再能简单地划分为富裕的发达国家和贫穷的欠发达国家。世界金融市场一体化程度越高,无论身处何地,具备金融知识的人的机会就越多——而金融文盲面临的社会地位下降风险也越大。就整体收入分配而言,这绝非一个平坦的世界,原因很简单,资本回报率相对于非熟练和半熟练劳动力的回报率已经飙升。“懂得理财”的回报从未如此丰厚,而对金融知识的无知所付出的代价也从未如此沉重。

My second great realization has to do with equality and its absence. If the financial system has a defect, it is that it reflects and magnifies what we human beings are like. As we are learning from a growing volume of research in the field of behavioural finance, money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong. Booms and busts are products, at root, of our emotional volatility. But finance also exaggerates the differences between us, enriching the lucky and the smart, impoverishing the unlucky and not-so-smart. Financial globalization means that, after more than three hundred years of divergence, the world can no longer be divided neatly into rich developed countries and poor less-developed countries. The more integrated the world’s financial markets become, the greater the opportunities for financially knowledgeable people wherever they live – and the bigger the risk of downward mobility for the financially illiterate. It emphatically is not a flat world in terms of overall income distribution, simply because the returns on capital have soared relative to the returns on unskilled and semi-skilled labour. The rewards for ‘getting it’ have never been so immense. And the penalties for financial ignorance have never been so stiff.

最后,我逐渐明白,很少有事情比金融危机的时机和规模更难准确预测,因为金融体系极其复杂,其内部许多关系都是非线性的,甚至是混乱的。货币的崛起从来都不是一帆风顺的,每一次新的挑战都会引发银行家及其同僚们新的应对。就像安第斯山脉的地平线一样,金融史并非一条平滑上升的曲线,而是一系列锯齿状、不规则的峰谷。或者,换个比喻,金融史看起来就像……这是一个典型的进化论案例,尽管其时间跨度比自然界的进化要短得多。正如美国财政部助理部长安东尼·W·瑞安在2007年9月向国会作证时所说:“正如自然界中某些物种会灭绝一样,一些新的融资技术可能不如其他技术成功。” 在我写作之时,这种达尔文式的语言显得格外贴切。

Finally, I have come to understand that few things are harder to predict accurately than the timing and magnitude of financial crises, because the financial system is so genuinely complex and so many of the relationships within it are non-linear, even chaotic. The ascent of money has never been smooth, and each new challenge elicits a new response from the bankers and their ilk. Like an Andean horizon, the history of finance is not a smooth upward curve but a series of jagged and irregular peaks and valleys. Or, to vary the metaphor, financial history looks like a classic case of evolution in action, albeit in a much tighter timeframe than evolution in the natural world. ‘Just as some species become extinct in nature,’ remarked US Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Anthony W. Ryan before Congress in September 2007, ‘some new financing techniques may prove to be less successful than others.’ Such Darwinian language seems remarkably apposite as I write.

我们是否正处于金融界“大灭绝”的边缘——就像那些周期性发生的物种大灭绝一样,例如导致地球90%物种灭绝的二叠纪末期大灭绝,或是导致恐龙灭绝的白垩纪-第三纪灾难?许多生物学家有理由担忧这种情况,因为人为造成的气候变化正在对全球自然栖息地造成严重破坏。但金融机构的“大灭绝”同样值得我们关注,因为另一场人为灾难正在缓慢而痛苦地侵蚀着全球金融体系。不止一位经验丰富的观察家(不仅包括前美联储主席艾伦·格林斯潘,还包括前财政部长亨利·保尔森)将当前的金融危机称为“百年一遇的事件”。的确,自20世纪30年代以来,从未有如此多的金融机构面临灭绝的威胁。但这不应成为那些未能预见到危机的人的借口。历史告诉我们,真正的大危机确实会发生,而且有时发生的频率远不止一个世纪一次。

Are we on the brink of a ‘great dying’ in the financial world – one of those mass extinctions of species that have occurred periodically, like the end-Permian extinction that killed off 90 per cent of Earth’s species, or the Cretaceous-Tertiary catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs? It is a scenario that many biologists have reason to fear, as man-made climate change wreaks havoc with natural habitats around the globe. But a great dying of financial institutions is also a scenario that we should worry about, as another man-made disaster works its way slowly and painfully through the global financial system. More than one experienced observer (not only the former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan but also Henry Paulson, the former Treasury Secretary) have referred to the present financial crisis as ‘a once in a century event’. Certainly, at no time since the 1930s have so many financial institutions been threatened with extinction. But that should not be offered as an excuse by those who failed to anticipate the crisis. History is here to tell us that really big crises do happen, and sometimes more frequently than once a century.

因此,无论你是为生计奔波还是渴望成为宇宙的主宰,了解金钱的崛起都比以往任何时候都更加重要。如果这本书有助于打破金融知识与其他知识之间那道危险的壁垒,那么我写作这本书也就没有白费。徒劳。

For all these reasons, then – whether you are struggling to make ends meet or striving to be a master of the universe – it has never been more necessary to understand the ascent of money than it is today. If this book helps to break down that dangerous barrier which has arisen between financial knowledge and other kinds of knowledge, then I shall not have toiled in vain.

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1

贪婪之梦

Dreams of Avarice

想象一个没有金钱的世界。一百多年来,共产主义者和无政府主义者——更不用说一些极端反动派、宗教原教旨主义者和嬉皮士——一直梦想着这样的世界。根据弗里德里希·恩格斯和卡尔·马克思的说法,金钱仅仅是资本主义剥削的工具,它用冷酷无情的“金钱关系”取代了所有的人际关系,甚至包括家庭内部的关系。正如马克思后来在《资本论》中试图论证的那样,金钱是商品化的劳动,是诚实劳动创造的剩余价值,被占有并“物化”,以满足资本家阶级永无止境的积累欲望。这种观念根深蒂固。直到20世纪70年代,一些欧洲共产主义者仍然渴望一个没有金钱的世界,例如《社会主义标准报》上这篇充满乌托邦色彩的文章:

Imagine a world with no money. For over a hundred years, Communists and anarchists – not to mention some extreme reactionaries, religious fundamentalists and hippies – have dreamt of just that. According to Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, money was merely an instrument of capitalist exploitation, replacing all human relationships, even those within the family, with the callous ‘cash nexus’. As Marx later sought to demonstrate in Capital, money was commoditized labour, the surplus generated by honest toil, appropriated and then ‘reified’ in order to satisfy the capitalist class’s insatiable lust for accumulation. Such notions die hard. As recently as the 1970s, some European Communists were still yearning for a moneyless world, as in this Utopian effusion from the Socialist Standard:

金钱将会消失……黄金可以按照列宁的意愿储备起来,用于建造公共厕所……在共产主义社会,商品将免费且自由获取。社会组织从根本上来说都将摆脱货币……疯狂而神经质的消费和囤积欲望将会消失。想要积累东西将是荒谬的:不再有钱可以揣进腰包,也不再需要雇佣工人……新人类将像他们的狩猎采集祖先一样,信赖大自然慷慨且常常丰厚地供给着他们。他们拥有维持生活所需的一切,对明天没有任何忧虑…… 1

Money will disappear . . . Gold can be reserved in accordance with Lenin’s wish, for the construction of public lavatories . . . In communist societies goods will be freely available and free of charge. The organisation of society to its very foundations will be without money . . . The frantic and neurotic desire to consume and hoard will disappear. It will be absurd to want to accumulate things: there will no longer be money to be pocketed nor wage-earners to be hired . . . The new people will resemble their hunting and gathering ancestors who trusted in a nature which supplied them freely and often abundantly with what they needed to live, and who had no worry for the morrow . . .1

然而,没有哪个共产主义国家——甚至包括朝鲜——发现完全摒弃货币是切实可行的。2即使只是对真正的狩猎采集社会略有了解,也会发现无现金生活存在诸多弊端。

Yet no Communist state – not even North Korea – has found it practical to dispense with money.2 And even a passing acquaintance with real hunter-gatherer societies suggests there are considerable disadvantages to the cash-free life.

五年前,一群努卡克-马库人意外地从哥伦比亚圣何塞德尔瓜维亚雷的亚马逊雨林中走了出来。努卡克人是一个被时间遗忘的部落,与世隔绝,直到这次突然出现。他们仅靠猎杀猴子和采集水果为生,对金钱毫无概念。令人惊讶的是,他们对未来也同样一无所知。如今,他们生活在城市附近的一片空地上,依靠政府救济维持生计。当被问及是否怀念丛林时,他们笑了。在经历了漫长的丛林跋涉、终日奔波觅食之后,他们惊讶地发现,如今素不相识的人给予了他们所需的一切,却不求任何回报

Five years ago, members of the Nukak-Makú unexpectedly wandered out of the Amazonian rainforest at San José del Guaviare in Colombia. The Nukak were a tribe that time forgot, cut off from the rest of humanity until this sudden emergence. Subsisting solely on the monkeys they could hunt and the fruit they could gather, they had no concept of money. Revealingly, they had no concept of the future either. These days they live in a clearing near the city, reliant for their subsistence on state handouts. Asked if they miss the jungle, they laugh. After lifetimes of trudging all day in search of food, they are amazed that perfect strangers now give them all they need and ask nothing from them in return.3

狩猎采集者的生活确实如托马斯·霍布斯描述自然状态时所说的那样,“孤独、贫穷、肮脏、野蛮而短暂”。诚然,在某些方面,在丛林中游荡猎捕猴子或许比辛勤劳作的自给自足农业要好。但人类学家已经证明,许多存活到近代的狩猎采集部落远不如努卡克人那样安宁。例如,在厄瓜多尔的希瓦罗人中,近60%的男性死亡是由暴力造成的。巴西的亚诺玛米人这一比例也接近40%。当两个这样原始的部落偶然相遇时,他们似乎更倾向于为了稀缺资源(食物和生育能力强的女性)而争斗,而不是进行商业交易。狩猎采集者不进行交易,他们劫掠。他们也不储蓄,而是随遇而安,有食物就吃。因此,他们不需要货币。

The life of a hunter-gatherer is indeed, as Thomas Hobbes said of the state of nature, ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. In some respects, to be sure, wandering through the jungle bagging monkeys may be preferable to the hard slog of subsistence agriculture. But anthropologists have shown that many of the hunter-gatherer tribes who survived into modern times were less placid than the Nukak. Among the Jivaro of Ecuador, for example, nearly 60 per cent of male deaths were due to violence. The figure for the Brazilian Yanomamo was nearly 40 per cent. When two groups of such primitive peoples chanced upon each other, it seems, they were more likely to fight over scarce resources (food and fertile women) than to engage in commercial exchange. Hunter-gatherers do not trade. They raid. Nor do they save, consuming their food as and when they find it. They therefore have no need of money.

金钱山

The Money Mountain

的确,比努卡克人更先进的社会也曾在没有货币的情况下运作。五百年前,南美洲最先进的社会——印加帝国——也同样没有货币。印加人欣赏稀有金属的审美价值。黄金是“太阳的汗水”,白银是“月亮的眼泪”。在印加帝国,劳动是价值单位,正如后来在共产主义社会中人们所设想的那样。而且,就像在共产主义制度下一样,印加帝国的经济依赖于严苛的中央计划和强制劳动。然而,在1532年,印加帝国被一个像克里斯托弗·哥伦布一样,专程来到新大陆寻找和利用贵金属的人所摧毁

More sophisticated societies than the Nukak have functioned without money, it is true. Five hundred years ago, the most sophisticated society in South America, the Inca Empire, was also moneyless. The Incas appreciated the aesthetic qualities of rare metals. Gold was the ‘sweat of the sun’, silver the ‘tears of the moon’. Labour was the unit of value in the Inca Empire, just as it was later supposed to be in a Communist society. And, as under Communism, the economy depended on often harsh central planning and forced labour. In 1532, however, the Inca Empire was brought low by a man who, like Christopher Columbus, had come to the New World expressly to search for and monetize precious metal.*

弗朗西斯科·皮萨罗是西班牙上校的私生子,1502年他横渡大西洋,寻求财富。他最早穿越巴拿马地峡抵达太平洋的欧洲人之一,并于1524年率领第一次探险队进入秘鲁,此后又进行了三次探险。秘鲁地形崎岖,食物匮乏,他们遇到的第一批土著居民对他们充满敌意。然而,第二次探险队在通贝斯地区受到的热烈欢迎——当地居民称他们为“太阳之子”——使皮萨罗和他的同伙更加坚定了继续前进的决心。皮萨罗返回西班牙,以“秘鲁总督”的身份寻求王室批准他“扩张卡斯蒂利亚帝国”的计划他组建了一支由三艘船、二十七匹马和一百八十名士兵组成的军队,装备了当时欧洲最先进的武器:火枪和机械弩。5这第三次远征于1530年12月27日从巴拿马启航。这些野心勃勃的征服者用了不到两年的时间就实现了他们的目标。目标:与阿塔瓦尔帕(Atahuallpa)对峙,他是刚刚去世的印加皇帝瓦伊纳·卡帕克(Huayna Capac)的两个不和的儿子之一。阿塔瓦尔帕拒绝了文森特·瓦尔韦德修士(Friar Vincente Valverd)让他臣服于基督教统治的提议,并轻蔑地将圣经扔在地上。他只能眼睁睁地看着西班牙人主要依靠战马(印加人从未见过这种动物)带来的恐惧,歼灭了他的军队。考虑到西班牙人兵力悬殊,这真是一场惊人的胜利。 6 阿塔瓦尔帕很快明白了皮萨罗(Pizarro)的意图,并试图用黄金(一次)和白银(两次)填满他被囚禁的房间来换取自由。在接下来的几个月里,印加人总共收集了13420磅22K黄金和26000磅纯银。7然而,皮萨罗仍决定处决他的俘虏,此人于1533年8月被公开绞死。8随着库斯科城的陷落,印加帝国在西班牙的疯狂掠夺中分崩离析。尽管1536年由名义上的傀儡印加曼科·卡帕克领导了一场起义,但西班牙的统治依然稳固,并以建造新都利马为象征。印加帝国于1572年正式解体。

The illegitimate son of a Spanish colonel, Francisco Pizarro had crossed the Atlantic to seek his fortune in 1502.4 One of the first Europeans to traverse the isthmus of Panama to the Pacific, he led the first of three expeditions into Peru in 1524. The terrain was harsh, food scarce and the first indigenous peoples they encountered hostile. However, the welcome their second expedition received in the Tumbes region, where the inhabitants hailed them as the ‘children of the sun’, convinced Pizarro and his confederates to persist. Having returned to Spain to obtain royal approval for his plan ‘to extend the empire of Castile’* as ‘Governor of Peru’, Pizarro raised a force of three ships, twenty-seven horses and one hundred and eighty men, equipped with the latest European weaponry: guns and mechanical crossbows.5 This third expedition set sail from Panama on 27 December 1530. It took the would-be conquerors just under two years to achieve their objective: a confrontation with Atahuallpa, one of the two feuding sons of the recently deceased Incan emperor Huayna Capac. Having declined Friar Vincente Valverd’s proposal that he submit to Christian rule, contemptuously throwing his Bible to the ground, Atahuallpa could only watch as the Spaniards, relying mainly on the terror inspired by their horses (animals unknown to the Incas), annihilated his army. Given how outnumbered they were, it was a truly astonishing coup.6 Atahuallpa soon came to understand what Pizarro was after, and sought to buy his freedom by offering to fill the room where he was being held with gold (once) and silver (twice). In all, in the subsequent months the Incas collected 13,420 pounds of 22 carat gold and 26,000 pounds of pure silver.7 Pizarro nevertheless determined to execute his prisoner, who was publicly garrotted in August 1533.8 With the fall of the city of Cuzco, the Inca Empire was torn apart in an orgy of Spanish plundering. Despite a revolt led by the supposedly puppet Inca Manco Capac in 1536, Spanish rule was unshakeably established and symbolized by the construction of a new capital, Lima. The Empire was formally dissolved in 1572.

皮萨罗本人死得也如同他生前一样充满暴力:1541年,他在利马与一位征服者同伴发生争执后被刺身亡。但他留给西班牙王室的遗产最终甚至超越了他自己的梦想。征服者们受到黄金国(El Dorado)传说的启发,传说中,一位印第安国王会在节日期间用金粉涂满全身。在皮萨罗的部下称之为“上秘鲁”的地方——一片山峦叠嶂、云雾缭绕的荒凉之地,不习惯高海拔的人需要挣扎着呼吸——他们发现了同样珍贵的东西。海拔高达4824米(15827英尺)的里科山(Cerro Rico)——字面意思是“富饶之山”——拥有着令人惊叹的对称性,它完美地体现了关于金钱最强大的理念:一座蕴藏着纯银矿的山。1545年,一位名叫迭戈·瓜尔帕(Diego Gualpa)的印第安人发现了这座山上的五大银矿脉,从此改变了世界经济史

Pizarro himself died as violently as he had lived, stabbed to death in Lima in 1541 after a quarrel with one of his fellow conquistadors. But his legacy to the Spanish crown ultimately exceeded even his own dreams. The conquistadors had been inspired by the legend of El Dorado, an Indian king who was believed to cover his body with gold dust at festival times. In what Pizarro’s men called Upper Peru, a stark land of mountains and mists where those unaccustomed to high altitudes have to fight for breath, they found something just as valuable. With a peak that towers 4,824 metres (15,827 feet) above sea level, the uncannily symmetrical Cerro Rico – literally the ‘rich hill’ – was the supreme embodiment of the most potent of all ideas about money: a mountain of solid silver ore. When an Indian named Diego Gualpa discovered its five great seams of silver in 1545, he changed the economic history of the world.9

印加人无法理解欧洲人对金银那永无止境的贪婪。“即使所有的雪都……“安第斯山脉的白银都变成了黄金,他们还是不满足,”曼科·卡帕克抱怨道。 10 印加人无法理解,对于皮萨罗和他的部下来说,白银不仅仅是闪亮的装饰品。金属。它可以被制成货币:记账单位、价值储存手段——便携式能源。

The Incas could not understand the insatiable lust for gold and silver that seemed to grip Europeans. ‘Even if all the snow in the Andes turned to gold, still they would not be satisfied,’ complained Manco Capac.10 The Incas could not appreciate that, for Pizarro and his men, silver was more than shiny, decorative metal. It could be made into money: a unit of account, a store of value – portable power.

波托西的塞罗里科山:西班牙帝国的财富之山

The Cerro Rico at Potosí: the Spanish Empire’s mountain of money

为了开采矿山,西班牙人最初依靠向附近村庄的居民支付工资。但矿山条件极其恶劣,以至于从16世纪末开始,不得不引入强制劳动制度(la mita ),从16个高地省份征召18至50岁的男子,每年工作17周。矿工的死亡率极其高,这在很大程度上是因为他们长期暴露于提炼银矿过程中产生的汞蒸气中。提炼银矿时,将磨碎的银矿石与汞混合,然后清洗并加热以烧掉汞。矿井下的空气(现在仍然)有毒,矿工们必须沿着最简陋的台阶下到700英尺深的矿井,长时间挖掘后,背着装满矿石的麻袋爬回地面。落石造成数百人伤亡。多明戈·德·圣托马斯宣称,新兴的淘银之城波托西是“地狱之口,每年都有大批人涌入其中,成为西班牙人贪婪献祭给他们‘神’的祭品。”罗德里戈·德·洛艾萨称矿井为“地狱深渊”,并指出“如果20名健康的印第安人在星期一进入矿井,星期六出来时可能有一半人会变成残疾人”。 13 奥古斯丁会修士弗雷·安东尼奥·德·拉·卡兰查在1638年写道:“波托西铸造的每一枚比索硬币,都意味着十名印第安人在矿井深处丧生。”随着土著劳动力的减少,成千上万的非洲奴隶被运来填补空缺,充当“人肉骡子”。即使在今天,塞罗里科令人窒息的竖井和隧道仍然给人一种地狱般的感觉。

To work the mines, the Spaniards at first relied on paying wages to the inhabitants of nearby villages. But conditions were so harsh that from the late sixteenth century a system of forced labour (la mita) had to be introduced, whereby men aged between 18 and 50 from the sixteen highland provinces were conscripted for seventeen weeks a year.11 Mortality among the miners was horrendous, not least because of constant exposure to the mercury fumes generated by the patio process of refinement, whereby ground-up silver ore was trampled into an amalgam with mercury, washed and then heated to burn off the mercury.12 The air down the mineshafts was (and remains) noxious and miners had to descend seven-hundred-foot shafts on the most primitive of steps, clambering back up after long hours of digging with sacks of ore tied to their backs. Rock falls killed and maimed hundreds. The new silver-rush city of Potosí was, declared Domingo de Santo Tomás, ‘a mouth of hell, into which a great mass of people enter every year and are sacrificed by the greed of the Spaniards to their “god”.’ Rodrigo de Loaisa called the mines ‘infernal pits’, noting that ‘if twenty healthy Indians enter on Monday, half may emerge crippled on Saturday’.13 In the words of the Augustinian monk Fray Antonio de la Calancha, writing in 1638: ‘Every peso coin minted in Potosí has cost the life of ten Indians who have died in the depths of the mines.’ As the indigenous workforce was depleted, thousands of African slaves were imported to take their places as ‘human mules’. Even today there is still something hellish about the stifling shafts and tunnels of the Cerro Rico.

对于那些被迫在此劳作的人来说,波托西是死亡之地,但西班牙却在这里发了财。1556年至1783年间,这座“富饶的山丘”产出了45000吨纯银,这些银被送往造币厂(Casa de Moneda)铸造成银条和银币,然后运往塞维利亚。尽管空气稀薄,气候恶劣,波托西迅速发展成为西班牙帝国的主要城市之一,鼎盛时期人口达到16万至20万,比当时大多数欧洲城市的人口还要多。“worth a potosí”至今仍是西班牙语中“价值连城”的意思。皮萨罗的征服似乎让西班牙王室富可敌国,其财富之巨甚至超过了贪婪之人的想象。

A place of death for those compelled to work there, Potosí was where Spain struck it rich. Between 1556 and 1783, the ‘rich hill’ yielded 45,000 tons of pure silver to be transformed into bars and coins in the Casa de Moneda (mint), and shipped to Seville. Despite its thin air and harsh climate, Potosí rapidly became one of the principal cities of the Spanish Empire, with a population at its zenith of between 160,000 and 200,000 people, larger than most European cities at that time. Valer un potosí, ‘to be worth a potosí’, is still a Spanish expression meaning to be worth a fortune. Pizarro’s conquest, it seemed, had made the Spanish crown rich beyond the dreams of avarice.


人们通常认为,货币是一种交换媒介,它消除了物物交换的低效之处;一种记账单位,便于估值和计算;以及一种价值储存手段,使得经济交易能够跨越漫长的时间和地理距离进行。为了充分发挥这些功能,货币必须具备可获得性、价格合理性、耐用性、可互换性、便携性和可靠性。由于黄金、白银和青铜等金属满足了上述大部分标准,因此数千年来一直被视为理想的货币原材料。已知最早的硬币可以追溯到公元前600年由考古学家在以弗所(位于今土耳其伊兹密尔附近)的阿尔忒弥斯神庙中发现。这些椭圆形吕底亚银币由金银合金琥珀金制成,正面饰有狮头图案,是雅典四德拉克马银币的前身。雅典四德拉克马银币是一种标准化的银币,一面是女神雅典娜的头像,另一面是猫头鹰(猫头鹰被认为象征智慧)。到了罗马时代,硬币的材质分为三种:金币(aureus)、银币(denarius)和铜币(sestertius)。这三种硬币的等级是根据相应金属的稀缺程度来划分的,但所有硬币的一面都饰有在位皇帝的头像,另一面则饰有罗穆卢斯和雷穆斯的传说人物。硬币并非古代地中海地区独有,但显然起源于那里。直到公元前221年,秦始皇才将标准化的青铜币引入中国。在每一种情况下,贵金属铸造的硬币都与强大的君主有关,他们垄断了货币铸造,部分原因是将其作为收入来源。

Money, it is conventional to argue, is a medium of exchange, which has the advantage of eliminating inefficiencies of barter; a unit of account, which facilitates valuation and calculation; and a store of value, which allows economic transactions to be conducted over long periods as well as geographical distances. To perform all these functions optimally, money has to be available, affordable, durable, fungible, portable and reliable. Because they fulfil most of these criteria, metals such as gold, silver and bronze were for millennia regarded as the ideal monetary raw material. The earliest known coins date back as long ago as 600 BC and were found by archaeologists in the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (near Izmir in modern-day Turkey). These ovular Lydian coins, which were made of the gold-silver alloy known as electrum and bore the image of a lion’s head, were the forerunners of the Athenian tetradrachm, a standardized silver coin with the head of the goddess Athena on one side and an owl (associated with her for its supposed wisdom) on the obverse. By Roman times, coins were produced in three different metals: the aureus (gold), the denarius (silver) and the sestertius (bronze), ranked in that order according to the relative scarcity of the metals in question, but all bearing the head of the reigning emperor on one side, and the legendary figures of Romulus and Remus on the other. Coins were not unique to the ancient Mediterranean, but they clearly arose there first. It was not until 221 BC that a standardized bronze coin was introduced to China by the ‘first Emperor’, Qin Shihuangdi. In each case, coins made of precious metal were associated with powerful sovereigns who monopolized the minting of money partly to exploit it as a source of revenue.

罗马的货币体系比罗马帝国本身存在的时间还要长。在……时期,物价仍然以银币(第纳尔)来标价。查理曼大帝时期,即768年至814年法兰克国王统治时期。当时的难题在于,当查理曼于800年加冕为奥古斯都皇帝时,西欧已长期面临白银短缺。伊斯兰帝国的商业中心更为发达,主宰着地中海南部和近东地区,对货币的需求也更大,因此贵金属往往从落后的欧洲流失。在查理曼时代,银币(denarius)极其稀少,24枚银币才能买到一头加洛林王朝的母牛。在欧洲的一些地区,胡椒和松鼠皮被用作货币替代品;而在另一些地区,“ pecunia”(金钱)则代表土地而非金钱。欧洲人试图通过两种方式解决这个问题。他们可以输出劳动力和货物,在巴格达用奴隶和木材换取白银,或在科尔多瓦和开罗用这些换取非洲黄金。或者,他们也可以通过对穆斯林世界发动战争来掠夺贵金属。十字军东征,如同随后的征服一样,其目的不仅在于使异教徒皈依基督教,更在于克服欧洲的货币短缺。 14 十字军东征耗资巨大,而净收益却微乎其微。雪上加霜的是,中世纪和近代早期各国政府未能找到解决经济学家所称的“小额零钱难题”的办法:即难以建立不同金属材质硬币之间的稳定汇率关系,这意味着小面额硬币不仅经常短缺,而且还会贬值和贬值。 15因此,在波托西以及他们在新大陆发现大量白银的其他地方(尤其是墨西哥的萨卡特卡斯),西班牙征服者似乎打破了几个世纪以来的限制。最初的受益者当然是资助这些征服的卡斯蒂利亚君主制。每年有多达一百艘船组成的船队,将170吨白银运过大西洋,停靠在塞维利亚港。所有产出的五分之一都归王室所有,在16世纪末的鼎盛时期,这占王室总支出的44%。 16但这些钱的使用方式确保了西班牙新获得的财富得以有效利用。它为整个欧洲大陆提供了货币刺激。西班牙的“八里亚尔”(即后来的“美元”)以德国塔勒为基础,成为世界上第一种真正意义上的全球货币,不仅为西班牙在欧洲进行的旷日持久的战争提供了资金,也为欧洲与亚洲之间迅速增长的贸易提供了资金。

The Roman system of coinage outlived the Roman Empire itself. Prices were still being quoted in terms of silver denarii in the time of Charlemagne, king of the Franks from 768 to 814. The difficulty was that by the time Charlemagne was crowned Imperator Augustus in 800, there was a chronic shortage of silver in Western Europe. Demand for money was greater in the much more developed commercial centres of the Islamic Empire that dominated the southern Mediterranean and the Near East, so that precious metal tended to drain away from backward Europe. So rare was the denarius in Charlemagne’s time that twenty-four of them sufficed to buy a Carolingian cow. In some parts of Europe, peppers and squirrel skins served as substitutes for currency; in others pecunia came to mean land rather than money. This was a problem that Europeans sought to overcome in one of two ways. They could export labour and goods, exchanging slaves and timber for silver in Baghdad or for African gold in Cordoba and Cairo. Or they could plunder precious metal by making war on the Muslim world. The Crusades, like the conquests that followed, were as much about overcoming Europe’s monetary shortage as about converting heathens to Christianity.14 Crusading was an expensive affair and the net returns were modest. To compound their monetary difficulties, medieval and early modern governments failed to find a solution to what economists have called the big problem of small change: the difficulty of establishing stable relationships between coins made of different kinds of metal, which meant that smaller denomination coins were subject to recurrent shortages, yet also to depreciations and debasements.15 At Potosí, and the other places in the New World where they found plentiful silver (notably Zacatecas in Mexico), the Spanish conquistadors therefore appeared to have broken a centuries-old constraint. The initial beneficiary was, of course, the Castilian monarchy that had sponsored the conquests. The convoys of ships – up to a hundred at a time – which transported 170 tons of silver a year across the Atlantic, docked at Seville. A fifth of all that was produced was reserved to the crown, accounting for 44 per cent of total royal expenditure at the peak in the late sixteenth century.16 But the way the money was spent ensured that Spain’s newfound wealth provided the entire continent with a monetary stimulus. The Spanish ‘piece of eight’, which was based on the German thaler (hence, later, the ‘dollar’), became the world’s first truly global currency, financing not only the protracted wars Spain fought in Europe, but also the rapidly expanding trade of Europe with Asia.

然而,即便拥有新大陆所有的白银,也无法使桀骜不驯的荷兰共和国屈服;无法确保西班牙王室对英格兰的统治;也无法阻止西班牙走向不可避免的经济和帝国衰落。如同点石成金的迈达斯王一样,十六世纪的西班牙君主查理五世和腓力二世发现,贵金属的丰富既是福也是祸。原因何在?他们为了支付征服战争的费用而开采了大量的白银,以至于白银本身的价值——也就是相对于其他商品的购买力——急剧下降。在所谓的“价格革命”期间(这场革命从16世纪40年代持续到17世纪40年代,席卷了整个欧洲),食品价格——此前三百年来一直没有出现持续上涨的趋势——显著上涨。在英国(我们掌握最完整价格数据的国家),同期生活成本上涨了七倍;这在今天并不算高通胀率(平均每年约2%),但以中世纪的标准来看,这却是面包价格的革命性增长。在西班牙,丰富的白银也像当今阿拉伯、尼日利亚、波斯、俄罗斯和委内瑞拉丰富的石油一样,成为了一种“资源诅咒”,它削弱了人们从事更高效经济活动的动力,同时强化了寻租独裁者的权力,削弱了代表机构(在西班牙,即科尔特斯议会)的权力。17

And yet all the silver of the New World could not bring the rebellious Dutch Republic to heel; could not secure England for the Spanish crown; could not save Spain from an inexorable economic and imperial decline. Like King Midas, the Spanish monarchs of the sixteenth century, Charles V and Philip II, found that an abundance of precious metal could be as much a curse as a blessing. The reason? They dug up so much silver to pay for their wars of conquest that the metal itself dramatically declined in value – that is to say, in its purchasing power with respect to other goods. During the so-called ‘price revolution’, which affected all of Europe from the 1540s until the 1640s, the cost of food – which had shown no sustained upward trend for three hundred years – rose markedly. In England (the country for which we have the best price data) the cost of living increased by a factor of seven in the same period; not a high rate of inflation these days (on average around 2 per cent per year), but a revolutionary increase in the price of bread by medieval standards. Within Spain, the abundance of silver also acted as a ‘resource curse’, like the abundant oil of Arabia, Nigeria, Persia, Russia and Venezuela in our own time, removing the incentives for more productive economic activity, while at the same time strengthening rent-seeking autocrats at the expense of representative assemblies (in Spain’s case the Cortes).17

西班牙人未能理解的是,贵金属的价值并非绝对。货币的价值只取决于别人愿意用什么来换取它。货币供应量的增加并不会使社会更加富裕,尽管它可能会让垄断货币生产的政府更加富有。在其他条件不变的情况下,货币扩张只会推高物价。

What the Spaniards had failed to understand is that the value of precious metal is not absolute. Money is worth only what someone else is willing to give you for it. An increase in its supply will not make a society richer, though it may enrich the government that monopolizes the production of money. Other things being equal, monetary expansion will merely make prices higher.


事实上,西方人长期以来将货币等同于金属,这完全是历史偶然。大约五千年前,在古代美索不达米亚,人们开始使用泥板记录农产品(如大麦或羊毛)或金属(如白银)的交易。银戒指、银块或银片当然可以作为现成的货币(谷物也是如此),但泥板同样重要,甚至可能更为重要。许多泥板保存至今,提醒我们,当人类最初开始用文字记录活动时,他们的目的并非为了书写历史、诗歌或哲学,而是为了进行商业活动。 18拿起这些古老的金融工具,人们不禁心生敬畏。尽管它们由泥土制成,但其保存时间却远比波托西造币厂的银元长得多。一枚保存尤为完好的代币出土于锡帕尔镇(今伊拉克泰勒阿布哈巴),其年代可追溯至阿米迪塔纳国王(公元前1683-1647年)统治时期,上面记载着持有者在收割时应获得一定数量的大麦。另一枚代币刻于其继任者阿米萨杜卡国王统治时期,规定持有者在旅程结束时应获得一定数量的白银。 19

There was in fact no reason other than historical happenstance that money was for so long equated in the Western mind with metal. In ancient Mesopotamia, beginning around five thousand years ago, people used clay tokens to record transactions involving agricultural produce like barley or wool, or metals such as silver. Rings, blocks or sheets made of silver certainly served as ready money (as did grain), but the clay tablets were just as important, and probably more so. A great many have survived, reminders that when human beings first began to produce written records of their activities they did so not to write history, poetry or philosophy, but to do business.18 It is impossible to pick up such ancient financial instruments without a feeling of awe. Though made of base earth, they have endured much longer than the silver dollars in the Potosí mint. One especially well-preserved token, from the town of Sippar (modern-day Tell Abu Habbah in Iraq), dates from the reign of King Ammi-ditana (1683–1647 BC) and states that its bearer should receive a specific amount of barley at harvest time. Another token, inscribed during the reign of his successor, King Ammi-saduqa, orders that the bearer should be given a quantity of silver at the end of a journey.19

如果这个基本概念对我们来说似曾相识,部分原因是现代纸币也发挥着类似的作用。只需看看任何一张英格兰银行纸币上的“魔法文字”:“我承诺按持票人要求支付……”。纸币(起源于七世纪的中国)本身几乎没有任何价值。它们仅仅是支付的承诺(因此西方最初称其为“期票”),就像四千年前古巴比伦的泥板一样。十美元纸币背面写着“我们信仰上帝”,但当你接受这张纸币付款时,你真正信任的人是正面人物(美国首任财政部长亚历山大·汉密尔顿)的继任者,而撰写本文时,这位继任者恰好是劳埃德·布兰克费恩的前任,高盛集团首席执行官小亨利·M·保尔森。当一个美国人用他的商品或劳动换取一把美元时,他……本质上是相信“汉克”保尔森(以及由此推断的美联储主席本·伯南克)不会重蹈西班牙的覆辙,制造出如此之多的这类东西,以至于它们最终的价值只剩下印刷它们的纸张。

If the basic concept seems familiar to us, it is partly because a modern banknote does similar things. Just take a look at the magic words on any Bank of England note: ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of . . .’. Banknotes (which originated in seventh-century China) are pieces of paper which have next to no intrinsic worth. They are simply promises to pay (hence their original Western designation as ‘promissory notes’), just like the clay tablets of ancient Babylon four millennia ago. ‘In God We Trust’ it says on the back of the ten-dollar bill, but the person you are really trusting when you accept one of these in payment is the successor to the man on the front (Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the US Treasury), who at the time of writing happens to be Lloyd Blankfein’s predecessor as chief executive of Goldman Sachs, Henry M. Paulson, Jr. When an American exchanges his goods or his labour for a fistful of dollars, he is essentially trusting ‘Hank’ Paulson (and by implication the Chairman of the Federal Reserve System, Ben Bernanke) not to repeat Spain’s error and manufacture so many of these things that they end up being worth no more than the paper they are printed on.

这是一块公元前两千年美索不达米亚的泥板,正面(左)和背面(右)。铭文记载,阿米尔-米拉将在收割时节向泥板持有者支付330尺大麦。

A clay tablet from second millennium BC Mesopotamia, front (left) and rear (right). The inscription states that Amil-mirra will pay 330 measures of barley to the bearer of the tablet at harvest time.

今天,尽管美元的购买力在过去五十年里显著下降,我们仍然对纸币感到满意——更不用说那些实际上是用废料制成的硬币了。它们根本算不上价值储存手段。更令人惊讶的是,我们对那些甚至看不见的货币也感到高兴。如今的电子货币可以从我们的雇主那里转移到我们的银行账户,再转移到我们最喜欢的零售店,而无需任何实际操作。实体化。正是这种“虚拟”货币如今主导了经济学家所谓的货币供应量。普通美国人手中的现金仅占货币供应量M2的11%。如今大多数货币的无形性或许正是其本质的最佳证明。征服者们未能理解的是,货币关乎信念,甚至是信仰:信任支付者;信任发行货币的人,或是兑现支票或转账的机构。货币并非金属,而是铭刻的信任。而铭刻于何处似乎并不重要:银器、黏土、纸张、液晶显示屏。从马尔代夫的贝壳到雅浦岛使用的巨型石盘,任何东西都可以作为货币。20而如今,在这个电子时代,似乎也没有什么东西可以作为货币了。

Today, despite the fact that the purchasing power of the dollar has declined appreciably over the past fifty years, we remain more or less content with paper money – not to mention coins that are literally made from junk. Stores of value these are not. Even more amazingly, we are happy with money we cannot even see. Today’s electronic money can be moved from our employer, to our bank account, to our favourite retail outlets without ever physically materializing. It is this ‘virtual’ money that now dominates what economists call the money supply. Cash in the hands of ordinary Americans accounts for just 11 per cent of the monetary measure known as M2. The intangible character of most money today is perhaps the best evidence of its true nature. What the conquistadors failed to understand is that money is a matter of belief, even faith: belief in the person paying us; belief in the person issuing the money he uses or the institution that honours his cheques or transfers. Money is not metal. It is trust inscribed. And it does not seem to matter much where it is inscribed: on silver, on clay, on paper, on a liquid crystal display. Anything can serve as money, from the cowrie shells of the Maldives to the huge stone discs used on the Pacific islands of Yap.20 And now, it seems, in this electronic age nothing can serve as money too.

金钱所体现的核心关系是贷款人和借款人之间的关系。再看看那些美索不达米亚的陶土。这些泥板上记录的交易都是偿还借出的商品;这些泥板显然是由贷款人制作并保存的(通常装在密封的陶罐中),用于记录到期金额和还款日期。古巴比伦的借贷体系显然相当复杂。债务可以转让,因此是“付给持票人”而非指定债权人。向在王宫或神庙存放粮食或其他商品的人发放陶土收据或汇票。借款人需要支付利息(这一概念可能源于牲畜群的自然增长),利率通常高达20%。汉谟拉比统治时期(公元前1792-1750)的数学计算表明,长期贷款可以收取类似复利的利息。但所有这一切的基础是借款人偿还承诺的可信度。 (英语中“credit”一词的词根是拉丁语“ credo ”,意为“我相信”,这并非巧合。)债务人或许会定期获得债务豁免——事实上,《汉谟拉比法典》规定每三年可以免除一次债务——但这似乎并未阻止私人和公共贷款机构在合理预期收回资金的情况下开展业务。 21相反,古代美索不达米亚的长期趋势是私人金融的扩张。到公元前六世纪,像巴比伦的埃吉比家族这样的家族已经崛起为强大的地主和放贷者,其商业利益远至南部一百多英里外的乌鲁克和东部的波斯。从那个时期流传下来的数千块泥板证明了曾经有多少人欠埃吉比家族的债。该家族繁荣了五代,这表明他们通常都能收回债务。

The central relationship that money crystallizes is between lender and borrower. Look again at those Mesopotamian clay tablets. In each case, the transactions recorded on them were repayments of commodities that had been loaned; the tablets were evidently drawn up and retained by the lender (often in a sealed clay container) to record the amount due and the date of repayment. The lending system of ancient Babylon was evidently quite sophisticated. Debts were transferable, hence ‘pay the bearer’ rather than a named creditor. Clay receipts or drafts were issued to those who deposited grain or other commodities at royal palaces or temples. Borrowers were expected to pay interest (a concept which was probably derived from the natural increase of a herd of livestock), at rates that were often as high as 20 per cent. Mathematical exercises from the reign of Hammurabi (1792–1750 BC) suggest that something like compound interest could be charged on long-term loans. But the foundation on which all of this rested was the underlying credibility of a borrower’s promise to repay. (It is no coincidence that in English the root of ‘credit’ is credo, the Latin for ‘I believe’.) Debtors might periodically be relieved – indeed the Laws of Hammurabi prescribed debt forgiveness every three years – but this does not appear to have deterred private as well as public lenders from doing business in the reasonable expectation of getting their money back.21 On the contrary, the long-term trend in ancient Mesopotamia was for private finance to expand. By the sixth century BC, families like the Babylonian Egibi had emerged as powerful landowners and lenders, with commercial interests as far afield as Uruk over a hundred miles to the south and Persia to the east. The thousands of clay tablets that survive from that period testify to the number of people who at one time or another were in debt to the Egibi. The fact that the family thrived for five generations suggests that they generally collected their debts.

说信贷起源于古代美索不达米亚并不完全准确。巴比伦的大部分贷款只是从皇家或宗教仓库中预支的资金。当时并没有像本章后面讨论的那样,创造出现代意义上的信贷。尽管如此,这仍然是一个重要的开端。如果没有借贷的基础,我们世界的经济史将截然不同。如果没有债权人和债务人之间日益紧密的联系网络,当今的全球经济几乎不可能起步。与音乐剧《歌厅》中的名曲不同,金钱并非世界运转的真正动力。但它确实推动着数量惊人的人员、商品和服务在全球各地流通。

It would not be quite correct to say that credit was invented in ancient Mesopotamia. Most Babylonian loans were simple advances from royal or religious storehouses. Credit was not being created in the modern sense discussed later in this chapter. Nevertheless, this was an important beginning. Without the foundation of borrowing and lending, the economic history of our world would scarcely have got off the ground. And without the ever-growing network of relationships between creditors and debtors, today’s global economy would grind to a halt. Contrary to the famous song in the musical Cabaret, money does not literally make the world go round. But it does make staggering quantities of people, goods and services go around the world.

令人惊讶的是,信贷理念在它发展最为迅猛的地区,却迟迟未能生根发芽,而且犹豫不决。

The remarkable thing is how belatedly and hesitantly the idea of credit took root in the very part of the world where it has flourished most spectacularly.

高利贷者

Loan Sharks

十三世纪初的意大利北部是一片被众多相互敌对的城邦瓜分的土地。罗马帝国遗留下来的众多制度中,就包括一套极其不适用于复杂数学计算的数字系统(i, ii, iii, iv…),更遑论满足商业需求。这个问题在比萨尤为突出,那里的商人甚至不得不应对七种不同的流通货币。相比之下,东方世界——例如阿拔斯王朝或宋朝——的经济生活要先进得多,正如查理曼大帝时代一样。为了发展现代金融,欧洲需要引进它。而一位名叫比萨的莱昂纳多(又名斐波那契)的年轻数学家,在这方面发挥了至关重要的作用。

Northern Italy in the early thirteenth century was a land subdivided into multiple feuding city-states. Among the many remnants of the defunct Roman Empire was a numerical system (i, ii, iii, iv . . .) singularly ill-suited to complex mathematical calculation, let alone the needs of commerce. Nowhere was this more of a problem than in Pisa, where merchants also had to contend with seven different forms of coinage in circulation. By comparison, economic life in the Eastern world – in the Abbasid caliphate or in Sung China – was far more advanced, just as it had been in the time of Charlemagne. To discover modern finance, Europe needed to import it. In this, a crucial role was played by a young mathematician called Leonardo of Pisa, or Fibonacci.

斐波那契的父亲是比萨的一位海关官员,当时居住在如今阿尔及利亚的贝贾亚。年轻的斐波那契沉浸于他所谓的“印度数学方法”中,这种方法融合了印度和阿拉伯的数学思想。他引入这些思想彻底改变了欧洲人的计数方式。如今,人们最津津乐道的是斐波那契数列(0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21…),其中每个数字都是前两个数字之和,并且每个数字与其前一个数字的比值趋近于“黄金分割”(约1.618)。这种模式反映了自然界中一些重复出现的规律(例如分形几何)。例如蕨类植物和贝壳)。*但斐波那契数列只是斐波那契在其开创性著作《计算之书》( Liber Abaci ,1202年出版)中引入欧洲的众多东方数学思想之一在书中,读者可以找到分数的解释,以及现值(未来收入流的折现值)的概念。22其中最重要的是斐波那契引入了阿拉伯数字。他不仅为欧洲带来了十进制系统,使各种计算比使用罗马数字要容易得多;他还展示了如何将其应用于商业记账、货币兑换,以及至关重要的利息计算。值得注意的是,《计算之书》中的许多例子都用皮革、辣椒、奶酪、油和香料等商品来表达,使之更加生动形象。这标志着数学在创造财富,特别是放贷方面的应用。一个典型的例子是这样的:

The son of a Pisan customs official based in what is now Bejaia in Algeria, the young Fibonacci had immersed himself in what he called the ‘Indian method’ of mathematics, a combination of Indian and Arab insights. His introduction of these ideas was to revolutionize the way Europeans counted. Nowadays he is best remembered for the Fibonacci sequence of numbers (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 . . .), in which each successive number is the sum of the previous two, and the ratio between a number and its immediate antecedent tends towards a ‘golden mean’ (around 1.618). It is a pattern that mirrors some of the repeating properties to be found in the natural world (for example in the fractal geometry of ferns and sea shells).* But the Fibonacci sequence was only one of many Eastern mathematical ideas introduced to Europe in his path-breaking book Liber Abaci, ‘The Book of Calculation’, which he published in 1202. In it, readers could find fractions explained, as well as the concept of present value (the discounted value today of a future revenue stream).22 Most important of all was Fibonacci’s introduction of Hindu-Arabic numerals. He not only gave Europe the decimal system, which makes all kinds of calculation far easier than with Roman numerals; he also showed how it could be applied to commercial bookkeeping, to currency conversions and, crucially, to the calculation of interest. Significantly, many of the examples in the Liber Abaci are made more vivid by being expressed in terms of commodities like hides, peppers, cheese, oil and spices. This was to be the application of mathematics to making money and, in particular, to lending money. One characteristic example begins:

某人将100英镑存入某商人处,每月每英镑利息为4第纳尔,每年取回30英镑。需计算每年本金减少的30英镑以及这30英镑的收益。求此人将资金存入该商人处多少年、多少月、多少天、多少小时……

A man placed 100 pounds at a certain [merchant’s] house for 4 denarii per pound per month interest and he took back each year a payment of 30 pounds. One must compute in each year the 30 pounds reduction of capital and the profit on the said 30 pounds. It is sought how many years, months, days and hours he will hold money in the house . . .

意大利的商业中心,例如斐波那契的故乡比萨或附近的佛罗伦萨,都为这种金融理念的萌芽提供了沃土。但威尼斯,这个比其他城市更容易受到东方影响的城市,最终成为了欧洲伟大的放贷实验室。西方文学中最著名的放贷人就居住在威尼斯,这并非巧合。他的故事精彩地揭示了几个世纪以来阻碍放贷文化传播的种种障碍。将斐波那契的理论转化为有效的金融实践并非易事。这些障碍并非经济或政治方面的,而是文化方面的。

Italian commercial centres like Fibonacci’s home town of Pisa or nearby Florence proved to be fertile soil for such financial seeds. But it was above all Venice, more exposed than the others to Oriental influences, that became Europe’s great lending laboratory. It is not coincidental that the most famous moneylender in Western literature was based in Venice. His story brilliantly illuminates the obstacles that for centuries impeded the translation of Fibonacci’s theories into effective financial practice. These obstacles were not economic, or political. They were cultural.


莎士比亚的戏剧《威尼斯商人》改编自十四世纪意大利书籍《笨蛋》(Il Pecorone)中的一个故事。该书是乔瓦尼·菲奥伦蒂诺于1378年创作的一部故事集,收录了许多故事和轶事。其中一个故事讲述了一位富有的女子嫁给了一位品行端正的年轻绅士。她的丈夫急需用钱,他的朋友为了帮忙,便去找放高利贷的人借钱。这位放高利贷的人,就像犹太放高利贷者夏洛克一样,要求以一磅肉作为抵押,如果借款无法偿还,就割下这磅肉。莎士比亚改写了这个故事,犹太放高利贷者夏洛克同意借给失恋的求婚者巴萨尼奥三千达克特,但条件是巴萨尼奥的朋友,商人安东尼奥必须作担保。正如夏洛克所说,安东尼奥是个“好人”——这并非指他品德高尚,而是指他的信誉“足够”。然而,夏洛克也指出,借钱给商人(或他们的朋友)是有风险的。安东尼奥的船只分散在世界各地,一艘开往北非,一艘开往印度,一艘开往墨西哥,还有一艘开往英国:

Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice is based on a story in a fourteenth-century Italian book called Il Pecorone (‘The Dunce’), a collection of tales and anecdotes written in 1378 by Giovanni Fiorentino. One story tells of a wealthy woman who marries an upstanding young gentleman. Her husband needs money and his friend, eager to help, goes to a moneylender to borrow the cash on his friend’s behalf. The moneylender, like Shylock a Jew, demands a pound of flesh as security, to be handed over if the money is not paid back. As Shakespeare rewrote it, the Jewish moneylender Shylock agrees to lend the lovelorn suitor Bassanio three thousand ducats, but on the security of Bassanio’s friend, the merchant Antonio. As Shylock says, Antonio is a ‘good’ man – meaning not that he is especially virtuous, but that his credit is ‘sufficient’. However, Shylock also points out that lending money to merchants (or their friends) is risky. Antonio’s ships are scattered all over the world, one going to North Africa, another to India, a third to Mexico, a fourth to England:

……他的资金来源只是推测:他有一艘货船开往的黎波里,另一艘开往印度;我还听说,在里亚尔托桥上,他还有第三艘船停泊在墨西哥,第四艘开往英国,以及其他一些在海外挥霍无度的投资。但船只不过是木板,水手不过是人:有陆地上的老鼠和水里的老鼠,有水里的盗贼和陆地上的盗贼,我指的是海盗,此外还有水、风和礁石的危险。

. . . his means are in supposition: he hath an argosy bound to Tripolis, another to the Indies; I understand moreover, upon the Rialto, he hath a third at Mexico, a fourth for England, and other ventures he hath, squandered abroad. But ships are but boards, sailors but men: there be land-rats and water-rats, water-thieves and land-thieves, I mean pirates, and then there is the peril of waters, winds and rocks.

正因如此,任何借钱给商人的人,哪怕只是借给商人一次远洋航行,都需要得到补偿。我们通常把这种补偿称为利息:即支付给贷款人的金额,超过借出的本金。如果威尼斯赖以生存的那种海外贸易没有因为投资于船只和船员而获得某种回报,那么威尼斯就不可能存在。

That is precisely why anyone who lends money to a merchant, if only for the duration of an ocean voyage, needs to be compensated. We usually call the compensation interest: the amount paid to the lender over and above the sum lent, or the principal. Overseas trade of the sort that Venice depended on could not have happened if its financiers had not been rewarded in some way for risking their money on mere boards and men.

但为什么夏洛克会变成如此邪恶的恶棍,竟要求割取安东尼奥一磅肉——实际上就是要他的命——如果他无法履行义务的话?答案当然是,夏洛克是历史上众多出身少数族裔的放贷者之一。在莎士比亚时代,犹太人在威尼斯提供商业信贷已有近一个世纪之久。他们在曾经被称为红银行(Banco Rosso)的建筑前进行交易,坐在他们的桌子(tavule)和长凳(banci)后面。但红银行位于距离市中心一段距离的狭小犹太区内。

But why does Shylock turn out to be such a villain, demanding literally a pound of flesh – in effect Antonio’s death – if he cannot fulfil his obligations? The answer is of course that Shylock is one of the many moneylenders in history to have belonged to an ethnic minority. By Shakespeare’s time, Jews had been providing commercial credit in Venice for nearly a century. They did their business in front of the building once known as the Banco Rosso, sitting behind their tables – their tavule – and on their benches, their banci. But the Banco Rosso was located in a cramped ghetto some distance away from the centre of the city.

威尼斯商人若想借钱,就必须前往犹太人聚居区,这其中自有缘由。对基督徒而言,放贷取息是一种罪过。放高利贷者,即那些收取利息的人,在1179年的第三次拉特兰公会议上被逐出教会。甚至认为放高利贷并非罪过的观点,也在1311-1312年的维也纳公会议上被定为异端邪说。基督徒放高利贷者必须向教会偿还债务,才能被安葬在圣地。他们尤其受到方济各会和多明我会的憎恶,这两个修会分别成立于1206年和1216年(恰好在斐波那契的《计算之书》出版之后)。这种禁忌的力量不容小觑,尽管到了莎士比亚时代,它的影响力无疑有所减弱。23

There was a good reason why Venetian merchants had to come to the Jewish ghetto if they wanted to borrow money. For Christians, lending money at interest was a sin. Usurers, people who lent money at interest, had been excommunicated by the Third Lateran Council in 1179. Even arguing that usury was not a sin had been condemned as heresy by the Council of Vienna in 1311–12. Christian usurers had to make restitution to the Church before they could be buried on hallowed ground. They were especially detested by the Franciscan and Dominican orders, founded in 1206 and 1216 (just after the publication of Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci). The power of this taboo should not be underestimated, though it had certainly weakened by Shakespeare’s time.23

在佛罗伦萨大教堂(Duomo)里,有一幅多梅尼科·迪·米凯利诺创作的壁画,描绘了伟大的佛罗伦萨诗人但丁·阿利吉耶里手捧他的著作《神曲》。正如但丁在他的杰作《神曲》第十七歌中所描绘的那样,地狱第七层专门辟出一部分空间留给放高利贷者:

In Florence’s Duomo (cathedral) there is a fresco by Domenico di Michelino that shows the great Florentine poet Dante Alighieri holding his book the Divine Comedy. As Dante imagined it in Canto XVII of his masterpiece, there was a special part of the seventh circle of Hell reserved for usurers:

悲伤……从他们的眼中涌出,让他们的泪水止不住地流淌;

他们一边这样那样地拍打着手,一边轻松地

现在来自滚烫的土壤,现在来自灼热的积雪,

事实上,行为举止与所见完全一致。

夏天,狗狗们用鼻子和爪子蹭来蹭去。

当它们被蚊蚋、苍蝇和跳蚤吃掉的时候。

我看到许多人被那炽热的缺陷灼伤,

尽管我极其仔细地观察了他们的脸,

那里没有一个我认识的人;但我看到了

如何,盖上清晰可见的印章,标明了费用和颜色,

每条脖子上都挂着一个大钱包,

他们的眼睛似乎仍然凝视着前方,贪婪地汲取着什么。

Sorrow . . . gushed from their eyes and made their sad tears flow;

While this way and that they flapped their hands, for ease

From the hot soil now, and now from the burning snow,

Behaving, in fact, exactly as one sees

Dogs in the summer, scuffing with snout and paw

When they’re eaten up with gnats and flies and fleas.

I looked at many thus scorched by the fiery flaw,

And though I scanned their faces with the utmost heed,

There was no one there I recognized; but I saw

How, stamped with charge and tincture plain to read,

About the neck of each a great purse hung,

Whereon their eyes seemed still to fix and feed.

犹太人原本也不应放贷取息。但旧约《申命记》中有一条巧妙的例外条款:“你可以借钱给外邦人取利,但不可借钱给你的弟兄取利。”换句话说,犹太人可以合法地借钱给基督徒,但不能借钱给其他犹太人。这样做的代价是被社会排斥。

Jews, too, were not supposed to lend at interest. But there was a convenient get-out clause in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy: ‘Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury.’ In other words, a Jew might legitimately lend to a Christian, though not to another Jew. The price of doing so was social exclusion.

1492年,犹太人被驱逐出西班牙。许多葡萄牙皈依基督教的犹太人(即“皈依者”)于1497年被迫改信基督教,他们与这些皈依者一起,逃往奥斯曼帝国寻求庇护。他们从君士坦丁堡和其他奥斯曼港口与威尼斯建立了贸易关系。犹太人在威尼斯的存在可以追溯到1509年,当时居住在梅斯特雷的犹太人为了躲避康布雷联盟战争而寻求庇护。起初,威尼斯政府不愿接纳这些难民,但很快便意识到他们或许能成为重要的资金和金融服务来源,因为他们既可以征税,也可以借贷。1516年,威尼斯当局在一处旧铸铁厂的遗址上划定了一片专门区域,作为犹太人的隔离区,这区域后来被称为新犹太区(ghetto nuovo , getto字面意思是铸造)。犹太人每晚以及在基督教节日期间都必须被限制在犹太区内。在威尼斯停留超过两周的人,必须在背后佩戴黄色“O”字标志,或戴黄色(后来改为猩红色)帽子或头巾。25居住期限根据每五年续签一次的“condette” (特许状)而定。26 1541年,威尼斯与一些来自罗马尼亚的犹太人达成了类似的协议,允许他们居住在另一个犹太人聚居区——旧犹太区(ghetto vecchio)。到1590年,威尼斯约有2500名犹太人。为了容纳这些新来者,犹太区的建筑被扩建至七层。

Jews had been expelled from Spain in 1492. Along with many Portuguese conversos, Jews who were forced to adopt Christianity by a decree of 1497, they sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. From Constantinople and other Ottoman ports they then established trading relationships with Venice. The Jewish presence in Venice dates from 1509, when Jews living in Mestre sought refuge from the War of the League of Cambrai. At first the city’s government was reluctant to accept the refugees, but it soon became apparent that they might prove a useful source of money and financial services, since they could be taxed as well as borrowed from.24 In 1516 the Venetian authorities designated a special area of the city for Jews on the site of an old iron foundry which became known as the ghetto nuovo (getto literally means casting). There they were to be confined every night and on Christian holidays. Those who stayed in Venice for more than two weeks were supposed to wear a yellow O on their backs or a yellow (later scarlet) hat or turban.25 Residence was limited to a stipulated period on the basis of condotte (charters) renewed every five years.26 A similar arrangement was reached in 1541 with some Jews from Romania, who were accorded the right to live in another enclave, the ghetto vecchio. By 1590 there were around 2,500 Jews in Venice. Buildings in the ghetto grew seven storeys high to accommodate the newcomers.

整个十六世纪,威尼斯犹太人的地位始终处于不稳定和脆弱的状态。1537年,威尼斯与奥斯曼帝国爆发战争,威尼斯元老院下令没收“土耳其人、犹太人和其他土耳其臣民”的财产。1570年至1573年的另一场战争导致所有犹太人被捕,财产被没收,但和平恢复后,他们获释并归还了财产。 27为了避免重蹈覆辙,犹太人向威尼斯政府请愿,要求在未来的战争中享有自由。幸运的是,他们有一位名叫丹尼尔·罗德里加的西班牙裔犹太商人作为代表,他是一位极具能力的谈判者。1589年,他成功争取到的特许状赋予所有犹太人威尼斯臣民的地位,允许他们参与黎凡特贸易——这是一项宝贵的特权——并允许他们公开信奉自己的宗教。然而,一些重要的限制仍然存在。他们不得加入行会或从事零售贸易,因此只能从事金融服务,而且他们的特权会在十八个月的通知期内被撤销。作为公民,犹太人在威尼斯法庭上胜诉的几率比夏洛克还要高。例如,1623年,莱昂·沃尔泰拉起诉了安东尼奥·达拉·唐纳,后者曾为一位骑士提供担保,这位骑士从沃尔泰拉那里借了一些物品后便消失了。然而,在1636-1637年,一起涉及贿赂法官的丑闻(一些犹太人牵涉其中)似乎再次引发了被驱逐的威胁。28

Throughout the sixteenth century, the position of the Venetian Jews remained conditional and vulnerable. In 1537, when war broke out between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, the Venetian Senate ordered the sequestration of the property of ‘Turks, Jews and other Turkish subjects’. Another war from 1570 to 1573 led to the arrest of all Jews and the seizure of their property, though they were freed and had their assets returned after peace had been restored.27 To avoid a repetition of this experience, the Jews petitioned the Venetian government to be allowed to remain free during any future war. They were fortunate to be represented by Daniel Rodriga, a Jewish merchant of Spanish origin who proved to be a highly effective negotiator. The charter he succeeded in obtaining in 1589 granted all Jews the status of Venetian subjects, permitted them to engage in the Levant trade – a valuable privilege – and allowed them to practice their religion openly. Nevertheless, important restrictions remained. They were not allowed to join guilds or to engage in retail trade, hence restricting them to financial services, and their privileges were subject to revocation at eighteen months’ notice. As citizens, Jews now stood more chance of success than Shylock in the Venetian law courts. In 1623, for example, Leon Voltera sued Antonio dalla Donna, who had stood security for a knight who had borrowed certain items from Voltera and then vanished. In 1636–7, however, a scandal involving the bribery of judges, in which some Jews were implicated, seems once again to have raised the threat of expulsion.28

尽管夏洛克的故事是虚构的,但它并非完全脱离威尼斯的现实。事实上,莎士比亚的剧作相当准确地揭示了早期现代放贷的三个重要方面:信贷市场尚处于萌芽阶段时,放贷者有权收取高额利息;法庭在不诉诸暴力的情况下解决金融纠纷的重要性;以及最重要的是,少数族裔债权人极易受到属于多数族裔的敌对债务人的反击。因为最终,夏洛克的计划当然失败了。尽管法庭承认他有权坚持履行契约——索要他应得的一磅肉——但法律也禁止他……他害死了安东尼奥。而且,因为他是外邦人,根据法律,他因谋害基督徒而被判处没收财产和性命。他最终只有接受洗礼才能逃脱惩罚。从此,除了夏洛克,所有人都过上了幸福的生活。

Though fictional, the story of Shylock is therefore not entirely removed from Venetian reality. Indeed, Shakespeare’s play quite accurately illustrates three important points about early modern money-lending: the power of lenders to charge extortionate interest rates when credit markets are in their infancy; the importance of law courts in resolving financial disputes without recourse to violence; but above all the vulnerability of minority creditors to a backlash by hostile debtors who belong to the ethnic majority. For in the end, of course, Shylock is thwarted. Although the court recognizes his right to insist on his bond – to claim his pound of flesh – the law also prohibits him from shedding Antonio’s blood. And, because he is an alien, the law requires the loss of his goods and life for plotting the death of a Christian. He escapes only by submitting to baptism. Everyone lives happily ever after – except Shylock.

《威尼斯商人》提出了关于经济学和反犹主义的深刻问题。为什么债务人并非总是违约——尤其当债权人属于不受欢迎的少数族裔时?为什么夏洛克们并非总是吃亏?

The Merchant of Venice raises profound questions about economics as well as anti-Semitism. Why don’t debtors always default on their creditors – especially when the creditors belong to unpopular ethnic minorities? Why don’t the Shylocks always lose out?


高利贷者,就像他们剥削的穷人一样,始终存在于我们身边。例如,他们在东非就十分猖獗。但我们无需远赴发展中国家就能了解原始放贷的运作方式。根据英国贸易和工业部2007年的一份报告,英国约有16.5万户家庭使用非法放贷者,每年借款总额高达4000万英镑,但偿还的金额却是借款额的三倍。要想了解为什么无论种族如何,个体放贷者几乎总是不受欢迎,你只需去我的家乡格拉斯哥看看。这座城市东区的贫民窟长期以来一直是高利贷者的滋生地。在我祖父母居住的谢特尔斯顿等地区,废弃的公寓楼窗户上装着铁卷帘,公交候车亭上涂满了宗派涂鸦。谢特尔斯顿的经济曾经围绕着博伊德钢铁厂工人的工资运转。如今,它则围绕着失业者邮局账户收到的救济金运转。谢特尔斯顿男性的预期寿命约为64岁,比英国平均水平低13岁,与巴基斯坦相同,这意味着当地新生男婴通常活不到领取国家养老金的年龄。

Loan sharks, like the poor on whom they prey, are always with us. They thrive in East Africa, for example. But there is no need to travel to the developing world to understand the workings of primitive money-lending. According to a 2007 report by the Department of Trade and Industry, approximately 165,000 households in the UK use illegal moneylenders, borrowing in aggregate up to £40 million a year, but repaying three times that amount. To see just why one-man moneylenders are nearly always unpopular, regardless of their ethnicity, all you need do is pay a visit to my home town, Glasgow. The deprived housing estates of the city’s East End have long been fertile breeding grounds for loan sharks. In districts like Shettleston, where my grandparents lived, there are steel shutters over the windows of derelict tenements and sectarian graffiti on the bus shelters. Once, Shettleston’s economic life revolved around the pay packets of the workers employed at Boyd’s ironworks. Now it revolves around the benefit payments made into the Post Office accounts of the unemployed. Male life expectancy in Shettleston is around 64, thirteen years less than the UK average and the same as in Pakistan, which means that a newborn boy there typically will not live long enough to collect his state pension.

格拉斯哥这些贫困地区是高利贷者的理想作案场所。在希灵顿区,杰拉德·劳曾是头号高利贷者长达二十年之久。他以佩斯利西路上的阿戈西酒吧为办公室,几乎每天都在那里工作。尽管他本人滴酒不沾,劳还是在那里放贷。他的借贷系统很简单。借款人会把福利金册或邮局现金卡交给他,以换取贷款,而贷款条款则记录在他的贷款簿上。福利金到期时,劳会把卡还给借款人,然后等待收取利息。贷款簿本身非常简陋:随意地记录着各种交易,其中反复出现着二三十个相同的名字和绰号,以及数额不等的贷款金额,例如“胡子阿尔 15”、“吉伯 100”、“伯纳黛特 150”、“小卡菲 1210”。劳向客户收取的标准利率高达每周25%。通常情况下,像“胡子阿尔”这样的人借10英镑,一周后偿还12.50英镑(本金加利息)。然而,劳的客户往往无力按时还款;考虑到当地有些人每天的生活费只有5.90英镑,这种情况也就不难理解了。于是他们又借了一些钱。很快,一些客户就欠了他几百甚至几千英镑。他们如此迅速地陷入债务泥潭,也就不足为奇了。每周25%的利息,一年下来就是超过1100万%的复利。

Such deprived areas of Glasgow are perfect hunting grounds for loan sharks. In the district of Hillington, Gerard Law was for twenty years the number one loan shark. He used the Argosy pub on Paisley Road West as his office, spending most working days there, despite himself being a teetotaller. Law’s system was simple. Borrowers would hand over their benefit books or Post Office cashcards to him in return for a loan, the terms of which he recorded in his loan book. When a benefit cheque was due, Law would give the borrower back his card and wait to collect his interest. The loan book itself was strikingly crude: a haphazard compilation of transactions in which the same twenty or thirty names and nicknames feature again and again alongside sums of varying sizes: ‘Beardy Al 15’, ‘Jibber 100’, ‘Bernadett 150’, ‘Wee Caffy 1210’. The standard rate of interest Law charged his clients was a staggering 25 per cent a week. Typically, the likes of Beardy Al borrowed ten pounds and paid back £12.50 (principal plus interest) a week later. Often, however, Law’s clients could not afford to make their scheduled repayments; hardly surprising when some people in the area have to live on as little as £5.90 a day. So they borrowed some more. Soon some clients owed him hundreds, even thousands, of pounds. The speed with which they became entirely trapped by their debts is scarcely surprising. Twenty-five per cent a week works out at over 11 million per cent compound interest a year.

从长远来看,欧洲的利率总体呈下降趋势。那么,为什么如今英国有些人要为一些微不足道的贷款支付高达八位数的利息呢?这些贷款,你难道违约才是傻瓜行为吗?劳的一些客户实际上智力低下。然而,显然有理由让那些理智的客户觉得,无论利率多么高得离谱,违背对他的承诺都是不明智的。正如《苏格兰人报》所言:“由于他的名声,他的许多受害者都害怕错过还款的风险”——尽管尚不清楚劳是否真的诉诸过暴力。正如夏洛克的故事所表明的那样,每个高利贷者的背后都潜藏着一种隐蔽的威胁。

Over the very long run, interest rates in Europe have tended to decline. So why do some people in Britain today pay eight-digit interest rates on trivial loans? These, surely, are loans you would be mad not to default on. Some of Law’s clients were in fact mentally subnormal. Yet there were evidently reasons why his sane clients felt it would be inadvisable to renege on their commitments to him, no matter how extortionate. As the Scotsman newspaper put it: ‘many of his victims were terrified to risk missing a payment due to his reputation’ – though it is not clear that Law ever actually resorted to violence.29 Behind every loan shark, as the case of Shylock also shows, there lurks an implicit threat.

高利贷者落网:格拉斯哥非法放贷部门的警员将杰拉德·劳带走。

The arrest of a loan shark: Gerard Law is led away by police officers of Glasgow’s Illegal Money-Lending Unit

谴责高利贷者不道德甚至犯罪很容易。杰拉德·劳因其行为被判处十个月监禁。然而,我们需要尝试理解他行为背后的经济逻辑。首先,他能够利用……事实是,没有一家主流金融机构愿意向谢特尔斯顿的失业者提供贷款。其次,劳之所以必须贪婪无情,正是因为他的小客户群极有可能拖欠贷款。放高利贷的根本难点在于,这个行业规模太小,风险太高,无法收取低利率。但高利率又使得违约的可能性大大增加,只有恐吓才能确保人们按时还款。那么,放贷者是如何克服这一根本矛盾的呢?——如果他们太慷慨,就赚不到钱;如果他们像杰拉德·劳那样过于强硬,人们最终会报警。

It is easy to condemn loan sharks as immoral and, indeed, criminal. Gerard Law was sentenced to ten months in prison for his behaviour. Yet we need to try to understand the economic rationale for what he did. First, he was able to take advantage of the fact that no mainstream financial institution would extend credit to the Shettleston unemployed. Second, Law had to be rapacious and ruthless precisely because the members of his small clientele were in fact very likely to default on their loans. The fundamental difficulty with being a loan shark is that the business is too small-scale and risky to allow low interest rates. But the high rates make defaults so much more likely that only intimidation ensures that people keep paying. So how did moneylenders learn to overcome the fundamental conflict?— if they were too generous, they made no money; if they were too hard-nosed, like Gerard Law, people eventually called in the police.

答案在于发展壮大——变得强大。

The answer is by growing big – and growing powerful.

银行业诞生

The Birth of Banking

夏洛克绝非唯一一个发现债权人固有弱点的放贷人,尤其当债权人本身就是……时。外国人。十四世纪初,意大利的金融业曾被佛罗伦萨的巴尔迪、佩鲁齐和阿恰尤利​​三大家族所垄断。到了14世纪40年代,由于两位主要客户——英格兰国王爱德华三世和那不勒斯国王罗伯特——的违约,这三大家族全部破产。但如果说这说明了放贷者的潜在弱点,那么美第奇家族的崛起则恰恰相反,它展现了放贷者的潜在权力。

Shylock was far from the only moneylender to discover the inherent weakness of the creditor, especially when the creditor is a foreigner. In the early fourteenth century, finance in Italy had been dominated by the three Florentine houses of Bardi, Peruzzi and Acciaiuoli. All three were wiped out in the 1340s as a result of defaults by two of their principal clients, King Edward III of England and King Robert of Naples. But if that illustrates the potential weakness of moneylenders, the rise of the Medici illustrates the very opposite: their potential power.

或许没有哪个家族能像美第奇家族在文艺复兴时期那样,对一个时代留下如此深刻的印记。两位美第奇家族成员成为教皇(利奥十世和克莱门特七世);两位成为法国王后(凯瑟琳和玛丽);三位成为公爵(佛罗伦萨、内穆尔和托斯卡纳)。恰如其分的是,正是政治权力理论大师尼科洛·马基雅维利为他们撰写了历史。他们对艺术和科学的赞助涵盖了从米开朗基罗到伽利略等众多天才。而他们令人叹为观止的建筑遗产至今仍令佛罗伦萨的现代游客叹为观止。只需看看卡法乔洛别墅、圣马可修道院、圣洛伦佐大教堂,以及16世纪中期科西莫·德·美第奇公爵居住的那些壮丽宫殿:昔日的皮蒂宫、重新装修的旧宫,以及拥有直通阿诺河的庭院的新市政厅(乌菲齐美术馆)。 30但这一切辉煌的源头是什么?像桑德罗·波提切利那光彩夺目的《维纳斯的诞生》这样的杰作,其资金又来自何处?答案很简单:美第奇家族是外汇交易商,是货币兑换商行会( Arte de Cambio)的成员。他们被称为银行家(banchieri),因为和威尼斯的犹太人一样,他们真的就坐在街边的桌子后面的长凳上进行交易。最初的美第奇银行(更准确地说是摊位)位于卡瓦尔坎蒂宫附近,在如今的波尔塔罗萨大街和拉纳艺术大街的拐角处,距离佛罗伦萨主要的羊毛市场只有很短的步行路程。

Perhaps no other family left such an imprint on an age as the Medici left on the Renaissance. Two Medici became popes (Leo X and Clement VII); two became queens of France (Catherine and Marie); three became dukes (of Florence, Nemours and Tuscany). Appropriately, it was that supreme theorist of political power, Niccolò Machiavelli, who wrote their history. Their patronage of the arts and sciences ran the gamut of genius from Michelangelo to Galileo. And their dazzling architectural legacy still surrounds the modern-day visitor to Florence. Only look at the villa of Cafaggiolo, the monastery of San Marco, the basilica of San Lorenzo and the spectacular palaces occupied by Duke Cosimo de’ Medici in the mid-sixteenth century: the former Pitti Palace, the redecorated Palazzo Vecchio and the new city offices (Uffizi) with their courtyard running down to the River Arno.30 But what were the origins of all this splendour? Where did the money come from that paid for masterpieces like Sandro Botticelli’s radiant Birth of Venus? The simple answer is that the Medici were foreign exchange dealers: members of the Arte de Cambio (the Moneychangers’ Guild). They came to be known as bankers (banchieri) because, like the Jews of Venice, they did their business literally seated at benches behind tables in the street. The original Medici bank (stall would be a better description) was located near the Cavalcanti palace, at the corner of the present-day via dia Porta Rossa and the Via dell’ Arte della Lana, a short walk from the main Florentine wool market.

在1390年代之前,或许可以这样认为:美第奇家族与其说是银行家,不如说是匪帮:一个名不见经传的小家族,以低暴力著称,而非以高额金融闻名。1343年至1360年间,至少有五名美第奇家族成员因犯下死罪而被判处死刑。 31随后,乔瓦尼·迪·比奇·德·美第奇出现了。他的目标是使美第奇家族的统治合法化。通过辛勤工作、节俭度日和周密计划,他成功了。

Prior to the 1390s, it might legitimately be suggested, the Medici were more gangsters than bankers: a small-time clan, notable more for low violence than for high finance. Between 1343 and 1360 no fewer than five Medici were sentenced to death for capital crimes.31 Then came Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici. It was his aim to make the Medici legitimate. And through hard work, sober living and careful calculation, he succeeded.

1385年,乔瓦尼成为其亲戚维耶里·迪·坎比奥·德·美第奇(Vieri di Cambio de' Medici)在罗马开设的银行分行的经理。维耶里是佛罗伦萨的一位放贷人。在罗马,乔瓦尼逐渐建立起自己作为货币交易商的声誉。鉴于梵蒂冈金库中流通着多种不同的货币,教皇在许多方面都是他的理想客户。正如我们所见,这是一个货币体系多元化的时代,有金币、银币,也有贱金属币,因此任何长途贸易或纳税都因货币兑换的需要而变得复杂。但乔瓦尼显然看到了家乡佛罗伦萨更大的商机,于是在1397年返回故乡。到1420年他将生意传给长子科西莫时,他已经在威尼斯和罗马设立了分行;后来又在日内瓦、比萨、伦敦和阿维尼翁增设了分行。乔瓦尼还收购了佛罗伦萨两家羊毛厂的股份。

In 1385 Giovanni became manager of the Roman branch of the bank run by his relation Vieri di Cambio de’ Medici, a moneylender in Florence. In Rome, Giovanni built up his reputation as a currency trader. The papacy was in many ways the ideal client, given the number of different currencies flowing in and out of the Vatican’s coffers. As we have seen, this was an age of multiple systems of coinage, some gold, some silver, some base metal, so that any long-distance trade or tax payment was complicated by the need to convert from one currency to another. But Giovanni clearly saw even greater opportunities in his native Florence, whence he returned in 1397. By the time he passed on the business to his eldest son Cosimo in 1420, he had established a branch of the bank in Venice as well as Rome; branches were later added in Geneva, Pisa, London and Avignon. Giovanni had also acquired interests in two Florence wool factories.

在美第奇家族早期的商业活动中,汇票(拉丁语:cambium per literas)尤为重要。汇票在中世纪发展起来,成为一种贸易融资方式。 32如果一位商人欠另一位商人一笔款项,而这笔款项在几个月后的交易完成之前无法以现金支付,债权人可以向债务人开具汇票,并直接使用该汇票作为支付手段,或者从愿意充当经纪人的银行家那里以贴现的方式获得现金。尽管教会谴责收取利息是高利贷,但精明的商人却可以从中获利。这正是美第奇家族商业的精髓所在。当时没有支票;指令以口头形式下达,并记录在银行账簿中。没有利息;储户可以获得酌情权(根据公司年利润的比例),以补偿他们承担的风险。 33

Of particular importance in the Medicis’ early business were the bills of exchange (cambium per literas) that had developed in the course of the Middle Ages as a way of financing trade.32 If one merchant owed another a sum that could not be paid in cash until the conclusion of a transaction some months hence, the creditor could draw a bill on the debtor and either use the bill as a means of payment in its own right or obtain cash for it at a discount from a banker willing to act as broker. Whereas the charging of interest was condemned as usury by the Church, there was nothing to prevent a shrewd trader making profits on such transactions. That was the essence of the Medici business. There were no cheques; instructions were given orally and written in the bank’s books. There was no interest; depositors were given discrezione (in proportion to the annual profits of the firm) to compensate them for risking their money.33

坐在长凳上的银行家:昆廷·马西斯,《银行家》(1514 年)

A banker on his bench: Quentin Massys, The Banker (1514)

乔瓦尼·迪 (Giovanni di) 的《libro segreto》 ——字面意思是秘密书*《比奇·德·美第奇》一书为美第奇家族的崛起提供了引人入胜的线索。34在某种程度上,这仅仅是一个关于一丝不苟的记账的故事。当然,以现代标准来看,其中也存在一些瑕疵。美第奇家族并没有系统地使用复式记账法,尽管这种方法早在14世纪40年代的热那亚就已经为人所知。35然而,现代研究者仍然会被美第奇家族账目的整洁有序所折服。档案馆中还保存着一些早期的美第奇家族资产负债表,其中储备金和存款被正确地排列在一侧(作为负债或“vostro ”),而对客户的贷款或商业票据则排列在另一侧(作为资产或“ nostro ”)。美第奇家族并非这些技术的发明者,但他们将其应用的规模远超佛罗伦萨此前的任何案例。然而,美第奇家族成功的真正关键在于……与其说是规模庞大,不如说是多元化。早期的意大利银行都是铁板一块的机构,很容易被一个违约的债务人拖垮,而美第奇银行实际上是由多个相互关联的合伙企业组成,每个合伙企业都基于一份特殊的、定期重新谈判的合同。分行经理并非雇员,而是初级合伙人,他们的报酬是利润分成。正是这种分散化管理模式,使得美第奇银行盈利颇丰。1402年,该银行的资本约为2万弗罗林,员工最多只有17人,但在1397年至1420年间,其利润却高达151,820弗罗林——年均约6,326弗罗林,年回报率高达32%。仅罗马分行的回报率很快就超过了30%。36佛罗伦萨的税务记录证明了这一模式的有效性,记录中一页又一页地列出了乔瓦尼·迪·比奇的资产,总计约91000弗罗林。37

The libro segreto – literally the secret book* – of Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici sheds fascinating light on the family’s rise.34 In part, this was simply a story of meticulous bookkeeping. By modern standards, to be sure, there were imperfections. The Medici did not systematically use the double-entry method, though it was known in Genoa as early as the 1340s.35 Still, the modern researcher cannot fail to be impressed by the neatness and orderliness of the Medici accounts. The archives also contain a number of early Medici balance sheets, with reserves and deposits correctly arranged on one side (as liabilities or vostro) and loans to clients or commercial bills on the other side (as assets or nostro). The Medici did not invent these techniques, but they applied them on a larger scale than had hitherto been seen in Florence. The real key to the Medicis’ success, however, was not so much size as diversification. Whereas earlier Italian banks had been monolithic structures, easily brought down by one defaulting debtor, the Medici bank was in fact multiple related partnerships, each based on a special, regularly renegotiated contract. Branch managers were not employees but junior partners who were remunerated with a share of the profits. It was this decentralization that helped make the Medici bank so profitable. With a capital of around 20,000 florins in 1402 and a payroll of at most seventeen people, it made profits of 151,820 florins between 1397 and 1420 – around 6,326 florins a year, a rate of return of 32 per cent. The Rome branch alone was soon posting returns of over 30 per cent.36 The proof that the model worked can be seen in the Florentine tax records, which list page after page of Giovanni di Bicci’s assets, totalling some 91,000 florins.37

美第奇银行账簿细节

Detail from a ledger of the Medici bank

乔瓦尼于1429年去世,临终遗言是嘱咐继承人要继承他卓越的理财才能。他的葬礼有26位美第奇家族成员参加,他们都向这位白手起家的家族掌门人致敬。1458年庇护二世就任教皇时,乔瓦尼之子科西莫·德·美第奇实际上就是佛罗伦萨的统治者。正如教皇本人所说:“政治问题在他的府邸解决。他选择的人担任官职……他决定和平与战争,掌控法律……他实际上就是国王,只是没有名义上的王权。”外国统治者被建议直接与他沟通,不要浪费时间去接触佛罗伦萨的其他人。佛罗伦萨历史学家弗朗切斯科·圭恰尔迪尼评论道:“从罗马陷落到今天,他所享有的声望,恐怕没有哪个普通公民能够企及。”波提切利最受欢迎的肖像画之一——描绘了一位英俊非凡的年轻人——实际上是为了纪念一位已故的银行家而创作的。奖章上的头像正是科西莫·德·美第奇,旁边刻着“ pater patriae ”(祖国之父)。到了1469年,当科西莫的孙子“伟大的洛伦佐”接管银行时,昔日的索普拉诺家族已经变成了科莱昂家族——而且规模更大。而这一切都建立在银行业之上。

When Giovanni died in 1429 his last words were an exhortation to his heirs to maintain his standards of financial acumen. His funeral was attended by twenty-six men of the name Medici, all paying homage to the self-made capo della casa. By the time Pius II became pope in 1458, Giovanni’s son Cosimo de’ Medici effectively was the Florentine state. As the Pope himself put it: ‘Political questions are settled at his house. The man he chooses holds office . . . He it is who decides peace and war and controls the laws . . . He is King in everything but name.’ Foreign rulers were advised to communicate with him personally and not to waste their time by approaching anyone else in Florence. The Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini observed: ‘He had a reputation such as probably no private citizen has ever enjoyed from the fall of Rome to our own day.’ One of Botticelli’s most popular portraits – of a strikingly handsome young man – was actually intended as a tribute to a dead banker. The face on the medal is that of Cosimo de’ Medici, and alongside it is the inscription pater patriae: ‘father of his country’. By the time Lorenzo the Magnificent, Cosimo’s grandson, took over the bank in 1469, the erstwhile Sopranos had become the Corleones – and more. And it was all based on banking.

波提切利的《三博士来朝》最能体现美第奇家族在金融领域取得的成就。仔细观察,你会发现画中的三位智者都是美第奇家族成员:为婴孩耶稣洗脚的老人是老科西莫;在他下方稍偏右的位置,是他的两个儿子皮耶罗(身着红衣)和乔瓦尼(身着白衣)。画中还有洛伦佐(身着浅蓝色长袍)以及紧握宝剑的朱利亚诺。这幅画是银行家行会会长委托创作的,旨在向美第奇家族致敬。或许它应该被命名为《美第奇家族的朝圣》。曾经被视为罪人,如今银行家们却已接近神明。

More than anything else, it is Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi that captures the transfiguration of finance that the Medici had achieved. On close inspection, the three wise men are all Medici: the older man washing the feet of the baby Jesus is Cosimo the Elder; below him, slightly to the right, are his two sons Piero (in red) and Giovanni (in white). Also in the picture are Lorenzo (in a pale blue robe) and, clasping his sword, Giuliano. The painting was commissioned by the head of the Bankers’ Guild as a tribute to the family. It should perhaps have been called The Adoration of the Medici. Having once been damned, bankers were now close to divinity.

佛罗伦萨共和国臣服于一个超级富有的银行家族,必然会引发反对。1433年10月至1434年9月间,科西莫及其众多支持者被从佛罗伦萨流放到威尼斯。1478年,洛伦佐的兄弟朱利亚诺在帕齐家族为推翻美第奇家族统治而发动的残酷镇压中被杀害。由于洛伦佐沉迷政治而忽视商业,银行本身也遭受了损失。像阿维尼翁的弗朗切斯科·萨塞蒂和布鲁日的托马索·波尔蒂纳里这样的分行经理权力越来越大,监管也越来越松懈。银行越来越依赖吸收存款;其贸易和外汇收入的波动性也越来越大。代价高昂的错误开始出现,例如布鲁日分行向勃艮第公爵“大胆的查理”发放的贷款,以及伦敦分行向爱德华四世国王发放的贷款,这些贷款从未全部偿还。为了维持公司的运转,洛伦佐被迫挪用市政的“嫁妆基金”(一种用于支付女儿嫁妆的互助基金)。最终,在1494年法国入侵的混乱中,洛伦佐家族被驱逐,所有财产都被没收和清算。多米尼加传教士吉罗拉莫·萨沃纳罗拉将小镇的不幸归咎于美第奇家族,呼吁举行一场名为“虚荣之火”的净化仪式。这一呼吁得到了响应,一群暴民冲进美第奇宫殿,烧毁了银行的大部分账簿。(幸存下来的文件上至今仍可见黑色的烧痕。)正如洛伦佐本人在他15世纪70年代创作的一首歌中所唱:“如果你想快乐,那就快乐吧。/明天充满未知。”

The subjugation of the Florentine republic to the power of one super-rich banking family inevitably aroused opposition. Between October 1433 and September 1434 Cosimo and many of his supporters were exiled from Florence to Venice. In 1478 Lorenzo’s brother Giuliano was murdered in the Pazzi family’s brutal attempt to end Medici rule. The bank itself suffered as a result of Lorenzo’s neglect of business in favour of politics. Branch managers like Francesco Sassetti of Avignon or Tommaso Portinari of Bruges became more powerful and less closely supervised. Increasingly, the bank depended on attracting deposits; its earnings from trade and foreign exchange grew more volatile. Expensive mistakes began to be made, like the loans made by the Bruges branch to Charles the Bold, the Duke of Burgundy, or by the London branch to King Edward IV, which were never wholly repaid. To keep the firm afloat, Lorenzo was driven to raid the municipal Monte delle Dote (a kind of mutual fund for the payment of daughters’ dowries).38 Finally, in 1494, amid the chaos of a French invasion, the family was expelled and all its property confiscated and liquidated. Blaming the Medici for the town’s misfortunes, the Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola called for a purgative ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’, a call answered when a mob invaded the Medici palace and burned most of the bank’s records. (Black scorch marks are still visible on the papers that survived.) As Lorenzo himself had put it in a song he composed in the 1470s: ‘If you would be happy, be so. / There is no certainty about tomorrow.’

然而,当佛罗伦萨的富裕精英们考虑以激进的萨沃纳罗拉和平民百姓作为美第奇家族统治的替代方案时,他们很快便开始怀念这个显赫的家族。1537年,年仅17岁的科西莫·德·美第奇(小科西莫)被召回佛罗伦萨,并于1569年被册封为托斯卡纳大公。这个公爵世系延续了两百多年,直至1743年。美第奇家族徽章上形似硬币的圆点(palle)象征着家族的起源,并成为其永恒的象征。

Yet when the wealthy elite of Florence contemplated the firebrand Savonarola and the plebeian mob as alternatives to Medici rule they soon began to feel nostalgic for the magnificent family. In 1537, at the age of 17, Cosimo de’ Medici (the Younger) was summoned back to Florence and in 1569 was created Grand Duke of Tuscany. The ducal line endured for more than two hundred years, until 1743. The coin-like palle (pills) on the Medici coat of arms served as an enduring reminder of the family’s origins.


尽管此前也有人尝试过,但美第奇家族是第一批将金融成功转化为世袭地位和权力的银行家。他们之所以能做到这一点,是因为他们吸取了一个至关重要的教训:在金融领域,规模小往往并非好事。他们通过打造比以往任何金融机构都规模更大、业务更多元化的银行,最终实现了这一目标。通过参与货币交易和贷款业务,这些机构找到了分散风险的方法。它们降低了违约风险。

Though others had tried before them, the Medici were the first bankers to make the transition from financial success to hereditary status and power. They achieved this by learning a crucial lesson: in finance small is seldom beautiful. By making their bank bigger and more diversified than any previous financial institution, they found a way of spreading their risks. And by engaging in currency trading as well as lending, they reduced their vulnerability to defaults.

意大利的银行体系成为北欧国家(尤其是荷兰、英国以及瑞典)的典范,这些国家在接下来的几个世纪里取得了巨大的商业成功。在阿姆斯特丹、伦敦和斯德哥尔摩,下一波决定性的金融创新浪潮席卷而来,现代中央银行的雏形也首次出现。17世纪见证了三家截然不同的新型机构的建立,它们以各自的方式服务于公共和私人金融职能。阿姆斯特丹外汇银行(Wisselbank)成立于1609年,旨在解决联合省内多种货币流通给商人带来的实际问题。当时,联合省拥有多达14个不同的造币厂,流通着大量的外国硬币。通过允许商人开设以标准化货币计价的账户,外汇银行开创了我们今天习以为常的支票和直接借记或转账系统。这使得越来越多的商业交易无需实际使用硬币即可完成。一位商人只需安排从自己的银行账户扣款,并将款项记入交易对手的账户,即可向另一位商人付款。39这套系统的局限性在于,外汇银行的存款与其贵金属和硬币储备保持着接近100%的比例。直到1760年,其存款略低于1900万弗罗林,而其金属储备却超过1600万。因此,挤兑几乎不可能发生,因为即使储户出于某种原因想要一次性清算存款,银行也拥有足够的现金来满足几乎所有储户的需求。这无疑确保了银行的安全,但也使其无法履行如今被视为银行本质特征的职能——创造信贷。

The Italian banking system became the model for those North European nations that would achieve the greatest commercial success in the coming centuries, notably the Dutch and the English, but also the Swedes. It was in Amsterdam, London and Stockholm that the next decisive wave of financial innovation occurred, as the forerunners of modern central banks made their first appearance. The seventeenth century saw the foundation of three distinctly novel institutions that, in their different ways, were intended to serve a public as well as a private financial function. The Amsterdam Exchange Bank (Wisselbank) was set up in 1609 to resolve the practical problems created for merchants by the circulation of multiple currencies in the United Provinces, where there were no fewer than fourteen different mints and copious quantities of foreign coins. By allowing merchants to set up accounts denominated in a standardized currency, the Exchange Bank pioneered the system of cheques and direct debits or transfers that we take for granted today. This allowed more and more commercial transactions to take place without the need for the sums involved to materialize in actual coins. One merchant could make a payment to another simply by arranging for his account at the bank to be debited and the counterparty’s account to be credited.39 The limitation on this system was simply that the Exchange Bank maintained something close to a 100 per cent ratio between its deposits and its reserves of precious metal and coin. As late as 1760, when its deposits stood at just under 19 million florins, its metallic reserve was over 16 million. A run on the bank was therefore a virtual impossibility, since it had enough cash on hand to satisfy nearly all of its depositors if, for some reason, they all wanted to liquidate their deposits at once. This made the bank secure, no doubt, but it prevented it performing what would now be seen as the defining characteristic of a bank, credit creation.

将近半个世纪后,在斯德哥尔摩,1657年斯德哥尔摩银行的成立打破了这一壁垒。尽管它与荷兰的Wisselbank银行职能相同,但斯德哥尔摩银行也被设计成一家“巷道银行”(Lanebank),这意味着它既从事贷款业务,也参与商业支付。通过发放超过其金属储备的贷款,可以说它开创了后来被称为部分准备金银行制度的先河,利用了存款可以盈利地贷给借款人的这一事实。由于储户不太可能集体提取存款,因此银行在任何时候只需保留其存款的一小部分作为准备金。因此,银行的负债是其存款(支付利息)加上其资本;其资产是其贷款(收取利息)加上其准备金。

It was in Stockholm nearly half a century later, with the foundation of the Stockholms Banco in 1657, that this barrier was broken through. Although it performed the same functions as the Dutch Wisselbank, the Banco was also designed to be a Lanebank, meaning that it engaged in lending as well as facilitating commercial payments. By lending amounts in excess of its metallic reserve, it may be said to have pioneered the practice of what would later be known as fractional reserve banking, exploiting the fact that money left on deposit could profitably be lent out to borrowers. Since depositors were highly unlikely to ask en masse for their money, only a fraction of their money needed to be kept in the bank’s reserve at any given time. The liabilities of the bank thus became its deposits (on which it paid interest) plus its capital; its assets became its loans (on which it could collect interest) plus its reserves.

十七世纪的第三项重大创新发生在伦敦,即1694年英格兰银行的成立。该银行的主要目的是协助政府筹集战争资金(通过将部分政府债务转换为银行股份),并被赋予了独特的特权。自1709年起,它是唯一一家获准以股份制形式运营的银行(参见第三章);自1742年起,它确立了对纸币发行的部分垄断权。纸币是一种特殊的本票,不计息,旨在方便支付,而无需交易双方都拥有活期账户。

The third great innovation of the seventeenth century occurred in London with the creation of the Bank of England in 1694. Designed primarily to assist the government with war finance (by converting a portion of the government’s debt into shares in the bank), the Bank was endowed with distinctive privileges. From 1709 it was the only bank allowed to operate on a joint-stock basis (see Chapter 3); and from 1742 it established a partial monopoly on the issue of banknotes, a distinctive form of promissory note that did not bear interest, designed to facilitate payments without the need for both parties in a transaction to have current accounts.

为了理解这三项创新的力量,哈佛商学院一年级MBA学生玩了一个简化的货币游戏。游戏开始时,假设一家中央银行代表政府向教授支付100美元,教授为政府做了一些收入不高的咨询工作。教授拿着这些钞票去一家假设由他的学生经营的银行存款,并拿到一张存款单。为了简化起见,假设这家银行的准备金率为10%(即,它希望将其准备金与总负债的比率维持在10%),它将10美元存入中央银行,并将剩余的90美元借给一位客户。客户决定如何处理贷款后,将钱存入另一家银行。这家银行也实行10%的准备金率,因此它将9美元存入中央银行,并将剩余的81美元贷给了另一位客户。经过几轮练习后,教授要求全班计算货币供应量的增加。由此,他引入了现代货币理论的两个核心定义:M0(也称为货币基础或高能货币),等于中央银行的总负债,即现金加上私人银行在中央银行的存款准备金;以及M1(也称为狭义货币),等于流通中的现金加上活期存款或“即期”存款。当资金存入两家不同的学生银行后,M0 等于 100 美元,而 M1 等于 271 美元(100 美元 + 90 美元 + 81 美元),这巧妙地(尽管是以一种高度简化的方式)说明了现代部分准备金银行制度如何创造信贷,从而创造货币。

To understand the power of these three innovations, first-year MBA students at Harvard Business School play a simplified money game. It begins with a notional central bank paying the professor $100 on behalf of the government, for which he has done some not very lucrative consulting. The professor takes the banknotes to a bank notionally operated by one of his students and deposits them there, receiving a deposit slip. Assuming, for the sake of simplicity, that this bank operates a 10 per cent reserve ratio (that is, it wishes to maintain the ratio of its reserves to its total liabilities at 10 per cent), it deposits $10 with the central bank and lends the other $90 to one of its clients. While the client decides what to do with his loan, he deposits the money in another bank. This bank also has a 10 per cent reserve rule, so it deposits $9 at the central bank and lends out the remaining $81 to another of its clients. After several more rounds, the professor asks the class to compute the increase in the supply of money. This allows him to introduce two of the core definitions of modern monetary theory: M0 (also known as the monetary base or high-powered money), which is equal to the total liabilities of the central bank, that is, cash plus the reserves of private sector banks on deposit at the central bank; and M1 (also known as narrow money), which is equal to cash in circulation plus demand or ‘sight’ deposits. By the time money has been deposited at two different student banks, M0 is equal to $100 but M1 is equal to $271 ($100 + $90 + $81), neatly illustrating, albeit in a highly simplified way, how modern fractional reserve banking allows the creation of credit and hence of money.

教授突然要求第一位学生归还他之前借的100美元,令他措手不及。这位学生不得不动用自己的存款,向第二位学生追讨贷款,由此引发了一系列连锁反应,导致M1货币供应量迅速收缩,其收缩速度与扩张速度几乎相同。这说明了银行挤兑的风险。由于第一家银行只有一位储户,他试图取款的金额相当于其储备金的十倍。显然,第一位银行家的生存取决于他能否收回借给客户的贷款,而这位客户又不得不从第二家银行提取所有存款,以此类推。银行家在发放贷款时,本应更仔细地考虑收回贷款的难易程度——这本质上是一个关于贷款流动性的问题。

The professor then springs a surprise on the first student by asking for his $100 back. The student has to draw on his reserves and call in his loan to the second student, setting off a domino effect that causes M1 to contract as swiftly as it expanded. This illustrates the danger of a bank run. Since the first bank had only one depositor, his attempted withdrawal constituted a call ten times larger than its reserves. The survival of the first banker clearly depended on his being able to call in the loan he had made to his client, who in turn had to withdraw all of his deposit from the second bank, and so on. When making their loans, the bankers should have thought more carefully about how easily they could call back the money – essentially a question about the liquidity of the loan.

必须承认,货币供应量的定义在某种程度上带有随意性。一些M1指标将旅行支票计入总额。M2则在此基础上增加了储蓄账户、货币市场存款账户和定期存单。M3的范围更广,包括离岸市场的欧洲美元存款以及银行与其他金融中介机构之间的回购协议。此处无需赘述这些技术细节。需要理解的关键在于,随着a) 无现金的银行间和银行间交易、b) 部分准备金制度以及c) 中央银行对纸币发行的垄断在西方世界的普及,货币的本质发生了深刻而重要的演变。货币不再像16世纪西班牙人所理解的那样,是开采、熔化并铸造成硬币的贵金属。如今,货币代表的是银行特定负债(存款和准备金)的总和。信贷则简单来说,就是银行资产(贷款)的总和。这些货币中可能仍然包含部分贵金属,但其中越来越多的部分会存放在中央银行的金库中。然而,大部分货币将由被认可为法定货币的纸币和代币,以及仅存在于存款账户对账单中的无形货币构成。金融创新将波托西的惰性白银转化为现代货币体系的基础,债务人和债权人之间的关系由数量日益增多的银行机构进行协调或“中介”。这些机构的核心功能如今是信息收集和风险管理。它们的利润来源在于最大化负债成本与资产收益之间的差额,同时又不至于大幅削减准备金,以免银行陷入挤兑危机——挤兑是指储户对银行偿付能力的信心危机,导致提款激增,最终破产,也就是银行的倒闭。

Definitions of the money supply have, it must be acknowledged, a somewhat arbitrary quality. Some measures of M1 included travellers’ cheques in the total. M2 adds savings accounts, money market deposit accounts and certificates of deposit. M3 is broader still, including eurodollar deposits held in offshore markets, and repurchase agreements between banks and other financial intermediaries. The technicalities need not detain us here. The important point to grasp is that with the spread throughout the Western world of a) cashless intra-bank and interbank transactions b) fractional reserve banking and c) central bank monopolies on note issue, the very nature of money evolved in a profoundly important way. No longer was money to be understood, as the Spaniards had understood it in the sixteenth century, as precious metal that had been dug up, melted down and minted into coins. Now money represented the sum total of specific liabilities (deposits and reserves) incurred by banks. Credit was, quite simply, the total of banks’ assets (loans). Some of this money might indeed still consist of precious metal, though a rising proportion of that would be held in the central bank’s vault. But most of it would be made up of those banknotes and token coins recognized as legal tender along with the invisible money that existed only in deposit account statements. Financial innovation had taken the inert silver of Potosí and turned it into the basis for a modern monetary system, with relationships between debtors and creditors brokered or ‘intermediated’ by increasingly numerous institutions called banks. The core function of these institutions was now information gathering and risk management. Their source of profits lay in maximizing the difference between the costs of their liabilities and the earnings on their assets, without reducing reserves to such an extent that the bank became vulnerable to a run – a crisis of confidence in a bank’s ability to satisfy depositors, which leads to escalating withdrawals and ultimately bankruptcy: literally the breaking of the bank.


值得注意的是,尽管北欧金融中心的意大利银行技术不断改进,但有一个国家却出人意料地远远落后。强大的西班牙拥有丰富的贵金属资源,却未能建立起完善的银行体系,反而依赖安特卫普的商人以未来的白银交付为抵押提供短期现金贷款。在马德里,货币的本质是信用而非金属的理念始终未能真正普及。事实上,西班牙王室最终甚至出现了债务违约。从1557年到1696年,西班牙至少有十四次全部或部分债务被偿还。如此糟糕的记录,即使拥有波托西的白银,也无法使西班牙成为信用良好的国家。在现代社会,权力将掌握在银行家手中,而不是破产者手中。

Significantly, even as Italian banking techniques were being improved in the financial centres of Northern Europe, one country lagged unexpectedly far behind. Cursed with an abundance of precious metal, mighty Spain failed to develop a sophisticated banking system, relying instead on the merchants of Antwerp for short-term cash advances against future silver deliveries. The idea that money was really about credit, not metal, never quite caught on in Madrid. Indeed, the Spanish crown ended up defaulting on all or part of its debt no fewer than fourteen times between 1557 and 1696. With a track record like that, all the silver in Potosí could not make Spain a secure credit risk. In the modern world, power would go to the bankers, not the bankrupts.

银行业的发展历程

The Evolution of Banking

金融史学家对于17世纪以后银行业的发展在多大程度上促成了始于18世纪末英国的经济增长加速,并随后蔓延至西欧以及欧洲在北美和澳大拉西亚大规模定居点的分支地区,存在分歧。40 毫无疑问,金融革命先于工业革命。诚然,纺织制造业和钢铁生产的决定性突破——工业革命的先锋——在融资方面并不十分依赖银行。41但银行在欧洲大陆的工业化进程中发挥的作用比在英国更为重要。事实上,试图寻找一种简单的因果关系(更成熟的金融机构促进了经济增长,或者经济增长刺激了金融发展)或许是徒劳的。这两个过程相互依存、自我强化,这似乎完全合情合理。这两个过程也表现出明显的演化特征,包括反复的突变(技术创新)、物种形成(新型企业的产生)和间断平衡(决定哪些企业能够生存,哪些企业将会消亡的危机)。

Financial historians disagree as to how far the growth of banking after the seventeenth century can be credited with the acceleration of economic growth that began in Britain in the late eighteenth century and then spread to Western Europe and Europe’s offshoots of large-scale settlement in North America and Australasia.40 There is no question, certainly, that the financial revolution preceded the industrial revolution. True, the decisive breakthroughs in textile manufacturing and iron production, which were the spearheads of the industrial revolution, did not rely very heavily on banks for their financing.41 But banks played a more important role in continental European industrialization than they did in England’s. It may in fact be futile to seek a simplistic causal relationship (more sophisticated financial institutions caused growth or growth spurred on financial development). It seems perfectly plausible that the two processes were interdependent and self-reinforcing. Both processes also exhibited a distinctly evolutionary character, with recurrent mutation (technical innovation), speciation (the creation of new kinds of firm) and punctuated equilibrium (crises that would determine which firms would survive and which would die out).

用亚当·斯密的话来说,“银行业运作得当,用纸币替代了大部分的……金银……就提供了一条空中通道。”在他出版《国富论》(1776年)后的一个世纪里,金融创新蓬勃发展,各种类型的银行在欧洲和北美如雨后春笋般涌现。其中历史最悠久的是票据贴现银行,它们通过……为国内和国际贸易提供融资。贴现是指将一位商人开出的汇票贴现给另一位商人。早在斯密时代,伦敦就聚集了像巴林银行这样非常成功的公司,它们专门从事跨大西洋商业银行业务(这项业务后来被称为跨大西洋商业银行)。出于监管原因,当时的英国银行几乎都是私人合伙制银行,其中一些专门服务于伦敦金融城(City of London)的业务,伦敦金融城是几个世纪以来商业金融的中心;而另一些则专门服务于土地所有者精英阶层的业务。后者就是所谓的“乡村银行”,它们的兴衰与英国农业的兴衰密切相关。

In the words of Adam Smith, ‘The judicious operation of banking, by substituting paper in the room of a great part of . . . gold and silver . . . provides . . . a sort of waggon-way through the air.’ In the century after he published The Wealth of Nations (1776), there was an explosion of financial innovation which saw a wide variety of different types of bank proliferate in Europe and North America. The longest-established were bill-discounting banks, which helped finance domestic and international trade by discounting the bills of exchange drawn by one merchant on another. Already in Smith’s day London was home to a number of highly successful firms like Barings, who specialized in transatlantic merchant banking (as this line of business came to be known). For regulatory reasons, English banks in this period were nearly all private partnerships, some specializing in the business of the City, that square mile of London which for centuries had been the focus for mercantile finance, while others specialized in the business of the landowning elite. These latter were the so-called ‘country banks’, whose rise and fall closely followed the rise and fall of British agriculture.

自然演化与金融演化的一个决定性区别在于所谓“智能设计”的作用——尽管在这种情况下,监管者总是人,而非神。英格兰银行通过漫长的试错过程,逐步发展出公共职能,作为1826年重申其纸币发行垄断权的回报,它在各省设立分支机构,并逐步接管了乡村银行的纸币发行业务。*此外,英格兰银行在银行间交易中也扮演着越来越重要的角色。越来越多的银行间债务清算都通过位于针线街的英格兰银行办事处进行。随着1833年限制其商业票据贴现率的高利贷法最终被废除,英格兰银行得以充分发挥其作为伦敦金融城最大银行的规模优势。其贴现率逐渐被视为所谓货币市场(用于短期信贷,主要通过商业票据贴现)中的最低短期利率。

A decisive difference between natural evolution and financial evolution is the role of what might be called ‘intelligent design’ – though in this case the regulators are invariably human, rather than divine. Gradually, by a protracted process of trial and error, the Bank of England developed public functions, in return for the reaffirmation of its monopoly on note issue in 1826, establishing branches in the provinces and gradually taking over the country banks’ note-issuing business.* Increasingly, the Bank also came to play a pivotal role in inter-bank transactions. More and more of the clearing of sums owed by one bank to another went through the Bank of England’s offices in Threadneedle Street. With the final scrapping in 1833 of the usury laws that limited its discount rate on commercial bills, the Bank was able fully to exploit its scale advantage as the biggest bank in the City. Increasingly, its discount rate was seen as the minimum short-term interest rate in the so-called money market (for short-term credit, mostly through the discounting of commercial bills).

接下来的四十年里,银行储备金与其纸币流通量之间应有的关系这一问题始终悬而未决。19世纪40年代,行长J·霍斯利·帕尔默的立场是,储备金应该……本质上,货币发行量将受贴现业务量的调控,前提是其中三分之一必须是金币或金条。首相罗伯特·皮尔爵士对此安排持怀疑态度,认为这会导致纸币发行过量和通货膨胀。皮尔于1844年颁布的《银行特许法案》将英国央行分为两部分:一部分是银行部门,负责开展央行自身的商业业务;另一部分是发行部门,拥有价值1400万英镑的证券以及数量不详的金币和金条,其数量将根据英国与世界其他地区的贸易平衡而波动。所谓的信托票据发行量不得超过证券和黄金的总和。然而,1847年、1857年和1866年的多次危机表明,这套规定过于僵化;每次危机发生后,为了避免流动性彻底崩溃,该法案都不得不暂时中止执行。*直到最近一次危机之后,也就是奥弗伦德·格尼银行因股市暴跌而破产之后,《经济学人》杂志主编沃尔特·白芝浩才重新定义了英国央行在危机中的恰当角色,将其定位为“最后贷款人”,即尽管利率较高,但仍可自由放贷,以应对流动性危机。42

The question that remained unresolved for a further forty years was what the relationship ought to be between the Bank’s reserves and its banknote circulation. In the 1840s the position of the Governor, J. Horsley Palmer, was that the reserve should essentially be regulated by the volume of discounting business, so long as one third of it consisted of gold coin or bullion. The Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, was suspicious of this arrangement, believing that it ran the risk of excessive banknote creation and inflation. Peel’s 1844 Bank Charter Act divided the Bank in two: a banking department, which would carry on the Bank’s own commercial business, and an issue department, endowed with £14 million of securities and an unspecified amount of coin and bullion which would fluctuate according to the balance of trade between Britain and the rest of the world. The so-called fiduciary note issue was not to exceed the sum of the securities and the gold. Repeated crises (in 1847, 1857 and 1866) made it clear that this was an excessively rigid straitjacket, however; in each case the Act had to be temporarily suspended to avoid a complete collapse of liquidity.* It was only after the last of these crises, which saw the spectacular run that wrecked the bank of Overend Gurney, that the editor of The Economist, Walter Bagehot, reformulated the Bank’s proper role in a crisis as the ‘lender of last resort’, to lend freely, albeit at a penalty rate, to combat liquidity crises.42

必须强调的是,维多利亚时代的货币问题并未被巴格霍特彻底解决。他和其他十九世纪杰出的经济理论家一样,都无力挑战一项神圣的原则——即一英镑应按每盎司黄金3英镑17先令10.5便士的汇率兑换成固定且不变的黄金。这项原则是在艾萨克·牛顿爵士担任皇家铸币局局长时期确立的。阅读当时关于金本位的讨论,便会发现,在许多方面,维多利亚时代的人们对贵金属的迷恋程度,丝毫不亚于三个世纪前的西班牙征服者。“唯有贵金属才是货币,”伦敦金融城一位显赫人物奥弗斯通男爵宣称。“纸币之所以是货币,是因为它们是金属货币的代表。否则,它们就是虚假的伪货币。一个储户可以获得金属,但并非所有储户都能获得,因此存款并非货币。” 43如果这一原则得到坚持,如果英国经济的货币供应真的取决于英格兰银行储备的金币和金条数量,那么即使考虑到19世纪新发现的金矿带来的扩张效应,英国经济的增长也会被彻底扼杀。英格兰银行的纸币发行如此严格,以至于从19世纪90年代中期到第一次世界大战,其金条储备的价值实际上超过了流通中的纸币价值。正是新型银行,特别是那些吸收存款的银行的激增,才使得货币扩张成为可能。 1858年后,股份制银行的限制被解除,为几家大型商业银行的崛起铺平了道路:伦敦威斯敏斯特银行(成立于1833年)、国民省银行(成立于1834年)、伯明翰米德兰银行(成立于1836年)、劳埃德银行(成立于1884年)和巴克莱银行(成立于1896年)。在比利时(法国兴业银行)、法国(法国动产信贷银行)和德国(达姆施塔特银行)蓬勃发展的工业投资银行,在奥弗伦德·格尼银行倒闭后,在英国的发展并不顺利。事实上,银行真正需要的并非大量购买工业公司的股份,而是能够吸引储户存入资金的机构,从而为资产负债表另一端的银行贷款业务创造不断扩大的基础。

The Victorian monetary problem was not wholly solved by Bagehot, it should be emphasized. He was no more able than the other pre-eminent economic theorists of the nineteenth century to challenge the sacred principle, established in Sir Isaac Newton’s time as Master of the Mint, that a pound sterling should be convertible into a fixed and immutable quantity of gold according to the rate of £3 17s 10½d per ounce of gold. To read contemporary discussion of the gold standard is to appreciate that, in many ways, the Victorians were as much in thrall to precious metal as the conquistadors three centuries before. ‘Precious Metals alone are money,’ declared one City grandee, Baron Overstone. ‘Paper notes are money because they are representations of Metallic Money. Unless so, they are false and spurious pretenders. One depositor can get metal, but all cannot, therefore deposits are not money.’43 Had that principle been adhered to, and had the money supply of the British economy genuinely hinged on the quantity of gold coin and bullion in the Bank of England’s reserve, the growth of the UK economy would have been altogether choked off, even allowing for the expansionary effects of new gold discoveries in the nineteenth century. So restrictive was Bank of England note issuance that its bullion reserve actually exceeded the value of notes in circulation from the mid-1890s until the First World War. It was only the proliferation of new kinds of bank, and particularly those taking deposits, that made monetary expansion possible. After 1858, the restrictions on joint-stock banking were lifted, paving the way for the emergence of a few big commercial banks: the London & Westminster (founded in 1833), the National Provincial (1834), the Birmingham & Midland (1836), Lloyds (1884) and Barclays (1896). Industrial investment banks of the sort that took off in Belgium (Société Générale), France (the Crédit Mobilier) and Germany (the Darmstädter Bank) fared less well in Britain after the failure of Overend Gurney. The critical need was not in fact for banks to buy large blocks of shares in industrial companies; it was for institutions that would attract savers to hand over their deposits, creating an ever expanding basis for new bank lending on the other side of the balance sheet.

在这一过程中,世纪之交涌现的新型储蓄银行发挥了尤为重要的作用。到1913年,英国储蓄银行的存款总额达到2.56亿英镑,约占英国存款总额的四分之一。德国储蓄银行的资产是达姆施塔特银行、德意志银行、德累斯顿银行和迪斯康托公司等更为知名的“大银行”的两倍半以上。总而言之,到第一次世界大战前夕,英国居民在银行的存款总额接近12亿英镑,而当时的纸币总额仅为……流通中的资金仅为4550万英镑。如今,资金主要都存放在银行里,人们看不到,但从未忘记。

In this process an especially important role was played by the new savings banks that proliferated at the turn of the century. By 1913 British savings bank deposits amounted to £256 million, roughly a quarter of all UK deposits. The assets of German savings banks were more than two and a half times greater than those of the better known ‘great banks’ like Darmstädter, Deutsche, Dresdner and the Disconto-Gesellschaft. All told, by the eve of the First World War, residents’ deposits in British banks totalled nearly £1.2 billion, compared with a total banknote circulation of just £45.5 million. Money was now primarily inside banks, out of sight, even if never out of mind.

尽管存在差异,但大多数发达经济体在监管方面基本上都效仿英国的做法,即通过实行金本位制的垄断性中央银行,并将存款集中于少数几家大型机构。法国银行成立于1800年,德国帝国银行成立于1875年,日本银行成立于1882年,瑞士国家银行成立于1907年。在英国,如同在欧洲大陆一样,银行集中化趋势十分明显,例如,乡村银行的数量从1809年的峰值755家锐减至1913年的仅17家。

Although there was variation, most advanced economies essentially followed the British lead when it came to regulation through a monopolistic central bank operating the gold standard, and concentration of deposit-taking in a relatively few large institutions. The Banque de France was established in 1800, the German Reichsbank in 1875, the Bank of Japan in 1882 and the Swiss National Bank in 1907. In Britain, as on the Continent, there were marked tendencies towards concentration, exemplified by the decline in the number of country banks from a peak of 755 in 1809 to just seventeen in 1913.

美国的金融发展历程截然不同。由于立法者对金融家权力过大的担忧,美国两度扼杀了中央银行的雏形(美国第一银行和第二银行),直到1913年才通过立法建立联邦储备系统。在此之前,美国基本上处于完全自由银行体系的自然实验状态。1864年的《国家银行法》大幅降低了设立私人银行的门槛,而且当时的资本要求按欧洲标准来看也较低。与此同时,跨州设立银行仍然存在诸多障碍。这些规则的综合影响导致19世纪末20世纪初国家特许银行和州特许银行的数量激增,从1899年的不足12000家增长到1922年峰值时的30000多家。大量资本不足的银行是金融不稳定的根源,恐慌成为美国经济生活的常态——最显著的例子是大萧条时期,当时一个运作仅十五年多的货币当局非但没有缓解,反而加剧了一场重大的银行危机。1933年存款保险制度的引入大大降低了美国银行遭受挤兑的风险。然而,直到1976年缅因州成为第一个将州际银行业务合法化的州之前,银行业仍然高度分散。直到1993年,在……之后储贷危机(见第 5 章)导致国家银行数量近一个世纪以来首次降至 3600 家以下。

The evolution of finance was quite different in the United States. There the aversion of legislators to the idea of over-mighty financiers twice aborted an embryonic central bank (the first and second Banks of the United States), so that legislation was not passed to create the Federal Reserve System until 1913. Up until that point, the US was essentially engaged in a natural experiment with wholly free banking. The 1864 National Bank Act had significantly reduced the barriers to setting up a privately owned bank, and capital requirements were low by European standards. At the same time, there were obstacles to setting up banks across state lines. The combined effect of these rules was a surge in the number of national and state-chartered banks during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from fewer than 12,000 in 1899 to more than 30,000 at the peak in 1922. Large numbers of under-capitalized banks were a recipe for financial instability, and panics were a regular feature of American economic life – most spectacularly in the Great Depression, when a major banking crisis was exacerbated rather than mitigated by a monetary authority that had been operational for little more than fifteen years. The introduction of deposit insurance in 1933 did much to reduce the vulnerability of American banks to runs. However, the banking sector remained highly fragmented until 1976, when Maine became the first state to legalize interstate banking. It was not until 1993, after the Savings and Loans crisis (see Chapter 5), that the number of national banks fell below 3,600 for the first time in nearly a century.


1924年,约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯曾公开抨击金本位制是“野蛮的遗迹”。然而,银行创造的货币摆脱贵金属锚定的过程却十分缓慢。金本位制无疑有其优势。汇率稳定使得贸易定价可预测,降低了交易成本,而价格的长期稳定性则起到了抑制通胀预期的作用。此外,金本位制或许还能促使各国政府采取审慎的财政和货币政策,从而降低借贷成本。将货币与单一商品标准挂钩,甚至将不同货币挂钩,其难点在于政策制定者必须做出选择:要么自由的资本流动,要么独立的国家货币政策。二者不可兼得。货币挂钩可能导致短期利率波动加剧,因为中央银行需要维持其货币相对于挂钩货币的价格稳定。如果挂钩货币的供应受到限制(例如19世纪70年代和80年代黄金供应相对于需求的供应受限),则可能导致通货紧缩。而且,它还会引发金融危机(正如1929年后金本位制恢复后发生的那样)。相比之下,主要基于银行存款和浮动汇率的货币体系则不受这些限制。金本位制走向衰亡的过程漫长而曲折,但当1971年8月15日,当尼克松总统关闭所谓的“黄金窗口”(在某些特定情况下,美元仍可通过该窗口兑换黄金)时,几乎没有人为此感到惋惜。金本位制的最后残余也随之消失。从那天起,货币与贵金属之间延续数百年的联系就此断裂。

In 1924 John Maynard Keynes famously dismissed the gold standard as a ‘barbarous relic’. But the liberation of bank-created money from a precious metal anchor happened slowly. The gold standard had its advantages, no doubt. Exchange rate stability made for predictable pricing in trade and reduced transaction costs, while the long-run stability of prices acted as an anchor for inflation expectations. Being on gold may also have reduced the costs of borrowing by committing governments to pursue prudent fiscal and monetary policies. The difficulty of pegging currencies to a single commodity-based standard, or indeed to one another, is that policymakers are then forced to choose between free capital movements and an independent national monetary policy. They cannot have both. A currency peg can mean higher volatility in short-term interest rates, as the central bank seeks to keep the price of its money steady in terms of the peg. It can mean deflation, if the supply of the peg is constrained (as the supply of gold was relative to the demand for it in the 1870s and 1880s). And it can transmit financial crises (as happened throughout the restored gold standard after 1929). By contrast, a system of money based primarily on bank deposits and floating exchange rates is freed from these constraints. The gold standard was a long time dying, but there were few mourners when the last meaningful vestige of it was removed on 15 August 1971, the day that President Richard Nixon closed the so-called gold ‘window’ through which, under certain restricted circumstances, dollars could still be exchanged for gold. From that day onward, the centuries-old link between money and precious metal was broken.

破产之国

Bankrupt Nation

田纳西州孟菲斯以蓝色麂皮鞋、烧烤和破产案而闻名。如果你想了解当今的银行家——美第奇家族的继承者——如何应对不可靠借款人带来的信贷风险问题,孟菲斯无疑是最佳去处。

Memphis, Tennessee, is famous for blue suede shoes, barbecues and bankruptcies. If you want to understand how today’s bankers – the successors to the Medici – deal with the problem of credit risk created by unreliable borrowers, Memphis surely is the place to be.

美国每年平均有100万到200万起破产案件,几乎所有案件都涉及那些宁愿破产也不愿偿还无力偿还的债务的个人。其中相当大比例的破产案件发生在田纳西州。令人惊讶的是,与16世纪威尼斯,或者更确切地说,与当今格拉斯哥某些地区的情况相比,这个过程似乎相对轻松。大多数在孟菲斯陷入困境的借款人都能摆脱债务,或者至少可以减少债务,而且不会遭受污名,也不会受到人身伤害。其中一个令人费解的问题是,世界上最成功的资本主义经济体似乎建立在一种容易破产的基础之上。

On average, there are between one and two million bankruptcy cases every year in the United States, nearly all of them involving individuals who elect to go bust rather than meet unmanageable obligations. A strikingly large proportion of them happen in Tennessee. The remarkable thing is how relatively painless this process seems to be – compared, that is, with what went on in sixteenth-century Venice or, for that matter, some parts of present-day Glasgow. Most borrowers who run into difficulties in Memphis can escape or at least reduce their debts, stigma-free and physically unharmed. One of the great puzzles is that the world’s most successful capitalist economy seems to be built on a foundation of easy economic failure.

2007年初夏,我第一次到访孟菲斯,就被这里无处不在的便捷信贷和破产服务所震惊。我只需在市中心附近一条普通的街道上走走,就能感受到这种氛围。首先映入眼帘的是购物中心和快餐店,田纳西州居民的大部分消费都集中在这里。紧挨着的是一家“税务顾问”,随时准备帮助那些手头拮据的人申请低收入者税收抵免。我看到一家提供汽车抵押贷款的商店,隔壁是一家二次抵押贷款公司,还有一家提供预支工资(利率高达200%)的支票兑现店,更不用说那家规模堪比百货商店的典当行了。对于那些已经典当了所有家当的人来说,一家名为“Rent-A-Center”的租赁中心也近在咫尺,提供价格低廉的家具和电视机出租。而它隔壁呢?是一家血浆中心,每次献血可获得55美元的报酬。现代孟菲斯赋予了“榨干”这个表达全新的含义。一品脱血或许并没有那么难割舍。虽然类似于割取一磅肉,但总体思路却出人意料地相似。

When I visited Memphis for the first time in the early summer of 2007 I was fascinated by the ubiquity and proximity of both easy credit and easy bankruptcy. All I had to do was to take a walk down a typical street near the city centre. First there were the shopping malls and fast food joints, which is where Tennesseans do much of their spending. Right next door was a ‘tax advisor’ ready to help those short of cash to claim their low-earners’ tax credits. I saw a shop offering loans against cars and, next door to it, a second-mortgage company, as well as a cheque-cashing shop offering advances on pay packets (at 200 per cent interest), not to mention a pawnshop the size of a department store. Conveniently located for those who had already pawned all their possessions was a Rent–A–Center offering cheap furniture and televisions for hire. And next door to that? The Plasma Center, offering $55 a go for blood donations. Modern Memphis gives a whole new meaning to the expression ‘bled dry’. A pint of blood may not be quite as hard to give up as a pound of flesh, but the general idea seems disconcertingly similar.

然而,在孟菲斯违约的后果远没有安东尼奥在威尼斯面临的死亡风险那么严重。离开血浆中心后,我的下一站是乔治·史蒂文森的办公室,他是众多在田纳西州西区美国破产法院为破产者提供咨询的律师之一。在我去田纳西州的时候,仅孟菲斯地区每年的破产申请数量就约为1万件,所以我并不惊讶地发现破产法院人满为患。这套系统看起来运转得非常顺畅。陷入破产的个人和夫妇们一个接一个地与律师坐下来,律师代表他们与债权人进行谈判。甚至还有快速通道可以加快破产程序——尽管平均只有五分之三的破产者最终获得解除破产状态(这意味着与债权人达成协议)。

Yet the consequences of default in Memphis are far less grave than the risk of death Antonio ran in Venice. After the Plasma Center, my next stop was the office of George Stevenson, one of the lawyers who make a living by advising bankrupts at the United States Bankruptcy Court Western District of Tennessee. At the time of my trip to Tennessee, the annual number of bankruptcy filings in the Memphis area alone was around 10,000, so I wasn’t surprised to find the Bankruptcy Court crowded with people. The system certainly appears to work very smoothly. One by one, the individuals and couples who have fallen into insolvency sit down with a lawyer who negotiates on their behalf with their creditors. There is even a fast-track lane for speedy bankruptcies – though on average only three out of five bankrupts are discharged (meaning that an agreement is reached with their creditors).

摆脱不可持续的债务并重新开始的能力是美国资本主义的一大特色。自1898年以来,每个美国公民都有权申请破产法第七章(清算)或第十三章(自愿个人重组)。无论贫富,美国人似乎都将破产视为一项“不可剥夺的权利”,几乎与“生命、自由和追求幸福的权利”同等重要。其理论依据是,美国法律的存在是为了鼓励创业——促进新企业的创立。这意味着,即使人们的计划第二次失败,也要给他们一次机会,从而让那些天生的冒险家通过反复试错来学习,直到最终找到致富之道。毕竟,今天的破产者很可能就是明天的成功企业家。

The ability to walk away from unsustainable debts and start all over again is one of the distinctive quirks of American capitalism. Since 1898, it has been every American’s right to file for Chapter VII (liquidation) or XIII (voluntary personal reorganization). Rich and poor alike, people in the United States appear to regard bankruptcy as an ‘unalienable right’ almost on a par with ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. The theory is that American law exists to encourage entrepreneurship – to facilitate the creation of new businesses. And that means giving people a break when their plans go wrong, even for the second time, thereby allowing the natural-born risk-takers to learn through trial and error until they finally figure out how to make that million. After all, today’s bankrupt might well be tomorrow’s successful entrepreneur.

乍一看,这个理论似乎确实成立。美国许多最成功的商人在创业初期都遭遇过失败,包括番茄酱大王亨利·约翰·亨氏、马戏团老板菲尼亚斯·巴纳姆和汽车巨头亨利·福特。这些人最终都成为了巨富,而非一无所有。至少,他们有机会尝试、失败,然后重新开始。然而,仔细观察田纳西州的情况,就会发现截然不同。孟菲斯破产法庭的当事人并非破产的商人,而是无力偿还账单的普通人——通常是美国人如果没有私人医疗保险,就可能突然面临巨额医疗账单。破产制度的初衷或许是为了帮助企业家及其企业,但如今98%的破产申请都被归类为非商业性破产,孟菲斯约四分之三的破产案件属于第13章破产,根据该章规定,债务人同意放弃部分或全部未来收入来偿还破产前的债务。最终,导致破产的主要原因并非创业精神,而是债务。2007年,美国消费者债务达到创纪录的2.5万亿美元。1959年,消费者债务相当于个人可支配收入的16%,而现在这一比例已达到24%。*如今,任何金融史学家面临的挑战之一是了解家庭债务激增的原因,并估计如果像田纳西州这样的州的破产率上升(这似乎不可避免),可能会产生什么后果。

At first sight, the theory certainly seems to work. Many of America’s most successful businessmen failed in their early endeavours, including the ketchup king Henry John Heinz, the circus supremo Phineas Barnum and the automobile magnate Henry Ford. All of these men eventually became immensely rich, not least because they were given a chance to try, to fail and to start over. Yet on closer inspection what happens in Tennessee is rather different. The people in the Memphis Bankruptcy Court are not businessmen going bust. They are just ordinary individuals who cannot pay their bills – often the large medical bills that Americans can suddenly face if they are not covered by private health insurance. Bankruptcy may have been designed to help entrepreneurs and their businesses, but nowadays 98 per cent of filings are classified as non-business and around three quarters of bankruptcies in Memphis are Chapter 13 filings, under which the debtor agrees to surrender some or all of his future earnings to pay off his pre-bankruptcy debts. The principal driver of bankruptcy turns out to be not entrepreneurship but indebtedness. In 2007 US consumer debt hit a record $2.5 trillion. Back in 1959, consumer debt was equivalent to 16 per cent of disposable personal income. Now it is 24 per cent.* One of the challenges for any financial historian today is to understand the causes of this explosion of household indebtedness and to estimate what the likely consequences will be if, as seems inevitable, there is an increase in the bankruptcy rate in states like Tennessee.

在能够恰当回答这些问题之前,我们需要先介绍金融体系的其他关键组成部分:债券市场、股票市场、保险市场、房地产市场,以及过去二十年来所有这些市场发生的非同寻常的全球化。然而,问题的根源必然在于货币及其负债构成关键的银行体系的演变。无可回避的现实似乎是,打破货币创造与金属锚之间的联系,导致了前所未有的货币扩张——以及随之而来的前所未有的信贷繁荣。以过去一百年的广义货币与产出之比来衡量流动性这一点显而易见。自20世纪70年代以来,这一比例呈上升趋势——以主要发达经济体的广义货币为例,在黄金窗口关闭前约为70%,到2005年已超过100%。 44欧元区的增幅尤为显著,从1990年的略高于60%上升到如今的略低于90%。与此同时,发达国家银行的资本充足率一直在缓慢但稳定地下降。目前,欧洲银行的资本占总资产的比例不到10%,而20世纪初这一比例约为25%。 45 换句话说,银行不仅吸收了更多存款,还发放了更大比例的存款,从而减少了自身的资本基础。如今,世界主要经济体的银行资产(即贷款)约占这些国家GDP总和的150%。46根据国际清算银行的数据,2006年12月国际银行业总资产约为29万亿美元,约占世界GDP的63% 。47

Before we can answer these questions properly, we need to introduce the other key components of the financial system: the bond market, the stock market, the insurance market, the real estate market and the extraordinary globalization of all these markets that has taken place over the past twenty years. The root cause, however, must lie in the evolution of money and the banks whose liabilities are its key component. The inescapable reality seems to be that breaking the link between money creation and a metallic anchor has led to an unprecedented monetary expansion – and with it a credit boom the like of which the world has never seen. Measuring liquidity as the ratio of broad money to output* over the past hundred years, it is very clear that the trend since the 1970s has been for that ratio to rise – in the case of broad money in the major developed economies from around 70 per cent before the closing of the gold window to more than 100 per cent by 2005.44 In the eurozone, the increase has been especially steep, from just over 60 per cent as recently as 1990 to just under 90 per cent today. At the same time, the capital adequacy of banks in the developed world has been slowly but steadily declining. In Europe bank capital is now equivalent to less than 10 per cent of assets, compared with around 25 per cent at the beginning of the twentieth century.45 In other words, banks are not only taking in more deposits; they are lending out a greater proportion of them, and minimizing their capital base. Today, banking assets (that is, loans) in the world’s major economies are equivalent to around 150 per cent of those countries’ combined GDP.46 According to the Bank for International Settlements, total international banking assets in December 2006 were equivalent to around $29 trillion, roughly 63 per cent of world GDP.47

那么,货币不再像金本位制时代那样保值也就不足为奇了。现代美元纸币的现行设计于1957年启用。自那时起,其相对于消费者价格指数的购买力已惊人地下降了87%。在此期间,年均通货膨胀率超过4%,是欧洲在波托西白银引发的所谓“价格革命”期间通货膨胀率的两倍。如果一个人在1970年黄金窗口尚未关闭时,将他1000美元的积蓄兑换成黄金,他当时只能得到略多于26.6盎司的黄金。而到了撰写本文时,黄金价格接近每盎司1000美元,他本可以以26596美元的价格出售这些黄金。

Is it any wonder, then, that money has ceased to hold its value in the way that it did in the era of the gold standard? The modern-day dollar bill acquired its current design in 1957. Since then its purchasing power, relative to the consumer price index, has declined by a staggering 87 per cent. Average annual inflation in that period has been over 4 per cent, twice the rate Europe experienced during the so-called price revolution unleashed by the silver of Potosí. A man who had exchanged his $1,000 of savings for gold in 1970, while the gold window was still ajar, would have received just over 26.6 ounces of the precious metal. At the time of writing, with gold trading at close to $1,000 an ounce, he could have sold his gold for $26,596.


一个没有金钱的世界会比我们现在的世界更糟糕,糟糕得多。把所有放贷者都看作是吸血鬼,榨取不幸债务人的血汗,这种想法是错误的(就像莎士比亚笔下的安东尼奥那样)。高利贷者或许会那样行事,但自美第奇家族时代以来,银行的发展正是为了(正如第三代罗斯柴尔德勋爵简洁地指出)“促进资金从A点(资金所在之处)流向B点(资金所需之处)”。简而言之,信贷和债务是经济发展的重要基石,其对国家财富的创造作用与采矿业、制造业或移动电话一样重要。相比之下,贫困很少能直接归咎于贪婪的金融家的恶行。它往往更多地与金融机构的匮乏,与银行的缺失有关,而不是与银行的存在有关。只有当格拉斯哥东区等地的借款人能够获得高效的信贷网络时,他们才能摆脱高利贷者的魔爪;只有当储户能够将钱存入可靠的银行时,资金才能从游手好闲的人流向勤劳的人(或从节俭的人流向挥霍的人)。

A world without money would be worse, much worse, than our present world. It is wrong to think (as Shakespeare’s Antonio did) of all lenders of money as mere leeches, sucking the life’s blood out of unfortunate debtors. Loan sharks may behave that way, but banks have evolved since the days of the Medici precisely in order (as the 3rd Lord Rothschild succinctly put it), to ‘facilitate the movement of money from point A, where it is, to point B, where it is needed’.48 Credit and debt, in short, are among the essential building blocks of economic development, as vital to creating the wealth of nations as mining, manufacturing or mobile telephony. Poverty, by contrast, is seldom directly attributable to the antics of rapacious financiers. It often has more to do with the lack of financial institutions, with the absence of banks, not their presence. It is only when borrowers in places like the East End of Glasgow have access to efficient credit networks that they can escape from the clutches of the loan sharks; only when savers can put their money in reliable banks that it can be channelled from the idle to the industrious (or from the thrifty to the spendthrift).

因此,银行业的发展演变是货币崛起过程中至关重要的第一步。始于2007年8月的金融危机与传统银行贷款关系不大,实际上也与破产关系不大,因为破产数量(由于法律变更)在2007年反而有所下降。其主要原因是……的兴衰。“证券化贷款”允许银行发放贷款,然后将其重新打包出售。而这一切之所以成为可能,是因为银行业崛起之后,现代金融体系的第二大支柱——债券市场——也随之兴起。

The evolution of banking was thus the essential first step in the ascent of money. The financial crisis that began in August 2007 had relatively little to do with traditional bank lending or, indeed, with bankruptcies, which (because of a legal change) actually declined in 2007. Its prime cause was the rise and fall of ‘securitized lending’, which allowed banks to originate loans but then repackage and sell them on. And that was only possible because the rise of banks was followed by the ascent of the second great pillar of the modern financial system: the bond market.

2

2

人类的奴役

Of Human Bondage

在比尔·克林顿就任总统的头一百天里,他的竞选经理詹姆斯·卡维尔发表了一番后来广为流传的言论。他告诉《华尔街日报》 :“我以前总想着,如果真有转世,我希望来世能当总统、教皇,或者一个打击率高达0.400的棒球击球手。但现在我想来世成为债券市场。你可以震慑所有人。”令他颇感意外的是,在去年11月的大选之后,债券价格确实上涨了,而这波上涨实际上早于总统发表削减联邦赤字的演讲。财政部长劳埃德·本特森评论道:“投资市场可不是好惹的。总统的这项努力真的可信吗?政府会坚持下去吗?他们已经做出了这样的判断。”美联储主席艾伦·格林斯潘表示,如果债券价格继续上涨,这将是“迄今为止我能想象到的最有效的经济刺激措施”。1究竟是什么原因让公职人员对政府欠条的买卖市场如此敬畏,甚至惊叹?

Early in Bill Clinton’s first hundred days as president, his campaign manager James Carville made a remark that has since become famous. ‘I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter,’ he told the Wall Street Journal. ‘But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.’ Rather to his surprise, bond prices had risen in the wake of the previous November’s election, a movement that had actually preceded a speech by the president in which he pledged to reduce the federal deficit. ‘That investment market, they’re a tough crowd,’ observed Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen. ‘Is this a credible effort [by the president]? Is the administration going to hang in there pushing it? They have so judged it.’ If bond prices continued to rally, said Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, it would be ‘by far the most potent [economic] stimulus that I can imagine.’1 What could make public officials talk with such reverence, even awe, about a mere market for the buying and selling of government IOUs?

继银行创造信贷之后,债券的诞生是货币发展史上的第二次重大革命。政府(以及大型企业)发行债券,是为了从比银行更广泛的个人和机构借款。以日本政府发行的十年期债券为例,其面值为10万日元,固定利率或“票息”为1.5%——这只是庞大债券市场中的一小部分。日本累计公共债务高达838万亿日元,其中大部分是自20世纪80年代以来积累的。该债券体现了日本政府的承诺,即在未来十年内每年向债券持有人支付10万日元的1.5%。债券的初始购买者有权随时以市场定价出售该债券。截至撰写本文时,该价格约为102,333日元。为什么?因为强大的债券市场就是这么决定的。

After the creation of credit by banks, the birth of the bond was the second great revolution in the ascent of money. Governments (and large corporations) issue bonds as a way of borrowing money from a broader range of people and institutions than just banks. Take the example of a Japanese government ten-year bond with a face value of 100,000 yen and a fixed interest rate or ‘coupon’ of 1.5 per cent – a tiny part of the vast 838 trillion yen mountain of public debt that Japan has accumulated, mostly since the 1980s. The bond embodies a promise by the Japanese government to pay 1.5 per cent of 100,000 yen every year for the next ten years to whoever owns the bond. The initial purchaser of the bond has the right to sell it whenever he likes at whatever price the market sets. At the time of writing, that price is around 102,333 yen. Why? Because the mighty bond market says so.

日本政府十年期债券,附带息票

Japanese government ten-year bonds, complete with coupons

债券市场起源于大约八百年前意大利北部的城邦,如今已发展成为规模庞大的市场。目前,国际债券交易总额约为18万亿美元。国内债券交易额(例如日本投资者持有的日本国债)更是高达50万亿美元。无论我们是否愿意(而且大多数人甚至都没有意识到),我们都受到债券市场的影响。债券市场在两个重要方面发挥着作用。首先,我们为养老储蓄的大部分最终都投资于债券市场。其次,由于债券市场规模庞大,且大型政府被视为最可靠的借款人,因此债券市场决定着整个经济体的长期利率。当债券价格下跌时,利率飙升,所有借款人都会遭受损失。其运作方式如下:假设某人有10万日元想要储蓄。购买一张10万日元的债券既能保障本金安全,又能为储户提供定期收益。具体来说,债券支付1.5%的固定利率或“票息”:对于一张10万日元的债券而言,每年可获得1500日元的收益。但市场利率或当前收益率的计算方法是用票息除以市场价格,目前为102,333日元:1,500 ÷ 102,333 = 1.47%。*现在设想这样一种情况:债券市场对日本政府巨额债务感到恐慌。假设投资者开始担心日本可能无法履行其承诺的年度支付义务。或者假设他们开始担心日元的走势,因为债券以日元计价,利息也以日元支付。在这种情况下,由于紧张的投资者抛售债券,债券价格将会下跌。只有当价格足够低,足以弥补日本违约或货币贬值风险增加时,才会有买家买入。假设我们债券的价格跌至80,000日元。那么收益率将为1,500 ÷ 80,000 = 1.88%。一夜之间,日本整体经济的长期利率将上涨略高于五分之二个百分点,从1.47%升至1.88%。在市场波动前投资债券以备养老的人,其收益将减少22%,因为他们的本金将随着债券价格的下跌而缩水。而那些在市场波动后想要申请抵押贷款的人,将发现自己至少需要支付更高的利率。每年上涨0.41%(按市场术语,即41个基点)。太平洋投资管理公司(PIMCO)旗下全球最大债券基金的负责人比尔·格罗斯表示:“债券市场之所以拥有强大的力量,是因为它是所有市场的基础。信贷成本,也就是基准债券的利率,最终决定了股票、房产以及所有资产类别的价值。”

From modest beginnings in the city-states of northern Italy some eight hundred years ago, the market for bonds has grown to a vast size. The total value of internationally traded bonds today is around $18 trillion. The value of bonds traded domestically (such as Japanese bonds owned by Japanese investors) is a staggering $50 trillion. All of us, whether we like it or not (and most of us do not even know it), are affected by the bond market in two important ways. First, a large part of the money we put aside for our old age ends up being invested in the bond market. Secondly, because of its huge size, and because big governments are regarded as the most reliable of borrowers, it is the bond market that sets long-term interest rates for the economy as a whole. When bond prices fall, interest rates soar, with painful consequences for all borrowers. The way it works is this. Someone has 100,000 yen they wish to save. Buying a 100,000 yen bond keeps the capital sum safe while also providing regular payments to the saver. To be precise, the bond pays a fixed rate or ‘coupon’ of 1.5 per cent: 1,500 yen a year in the case of a 100,000 yen bond. But the market interest rate or current yield is calculated by dividing the coupon by the market price, which is currently 102,333 yen: 1,500 ÷ 102,333 = 1.47 per cent.* Now imagine a scenario in which the bond market took fright at the huge size of the Japanese government’s debt. Suppose investors began to worry that Japan might be unable to meet the annual payments to which it had committed itself. Or suppose they began to worry about the health of the Japanese currency, the yen, in which bonds are denominated and in which the interest is paid. In such circumstances, the price of the bond would drop as nervous investors sold off their holdings. Buyers would only be found at a price low enough to compensate them for the increased risk of a Japanese default or currency depreciation. Let us imagine the price of our bond fell to 80,000. Then the yield would be 1,500 ÷ 80,000 = 1.88 per cent. At a stroke, long-term interest rates for the Japanese economy as a whole would have jumped by just over two fifths of one per cent, from 1.47 per cent to 1.88. People who had invested in bonds for their retirement before the market move would be 22 per cent worse off, since their capital would have declined by as much as the bond price. And people who wanted to take out a mortgage after the market move would find themselves paying at least 0.41 per cent a year (in market parlance, 41 basis points) more. In the words of Bill Gross, who runs the world’s largest bond fund at the Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO), ‘bond markets have power because they’re the fundamental base for all markets. The cost of credit, the interest rate [on a benchmark bond], ultimately determines the value of stocks, homes, all asset classes.’

从政治家的角度来看,债券市场之所以强大,部分原因在于它每天都在对各国政府的财政和货币政策的可信度做出评判。但它真正的力量在于它能够通过提高借贷成本来惩罚政府。即使利率仅上升0.5个百分点,也会对一个财政赤字政府造成打击,使其本已高企的支出雪上加霜,增加偿债成本。正如许多金融关系一样,这其中存在一个反馈循环。更高的利息支出导致赤字进一步扩大。债券市场对此反应更加强烈。债券再次遭到抛售。利率再次上升。如此循环往复。政府迟早会面临三种截然不同的选择:是部分债务违约,从而印证债券市场最坏的预期?还是为了安抚债券市场,削减其他领域的开支,从而激怒选民或既得利益集团?又或是试图通过增税来减少赤字?债券市场最初是为了促进政府借贷而设立的。然而,在危机时期,它最终却可能左右政府的政策。

From a politician’s point of view, the bond market is powerful partly because it passes a daily judgment on the credibility of every government’s fiscal and monetary policies. But its real power lies in its ability to punish a government with higher borrowing costs. Even an upward move of half a percentage point can hurt a government that is running a deficit, adding higher debt service to its already high expenditures. As in so many financial relationships, there is a feedback loop. The higher interest payments make the deficit even larger. The bond market raises its eyebrows even higher. The bonds sell off again. The interest rates go up again. And so on. Sooner or later the government faces three stark alternatives. Does it default on a part of its debt, fulfilling the bond market’s worst fears? Or, to reassure the bond market, does it cut expenditures in some other area, upsetting voters or vested interests? Or does it try to reduce the deficit by raising taxes? The bond market began by facilitating government borrowing. In a crisis, however, it can end up dictating government policy.

那么,为什么这位“邦德先生”比伊恩·弗莱明笔下的邦德先生强大得多?为什么这两种邦德都拥有杀人执照?

So how did this ‘Mr Bond’ become so much more powerful than the Mr Bond created by Ian Fleming? Why, indeed, do both kinds of bond have a license to kill?

巨额债务

Mountains of Debt

古希腊哲学家赫拉克利特宣称,“战争是万物之父”。它无疑也是债券市场的起源。在彼得·范德海登的非凡版画《金钱之战》中,可以看到存钱罐、钱袋、装满硬币的桶……宝箱——其中大多数都装备精良,刀剑长矛林立——在一片混乱的混战中互相攻击。雕刻下方的荷兰诗句写道:“这一切争斗都是为了金钱和货物。”但这段铭文同样可以表达的是:“只有筹集到足够的资金,这场战争才有可能发生。”通过政府债务市场为战争融资的能力,如同金融史上的许多其他事物一样,是意大利文艺复兴时期的一项发明。

‘War’, declared the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, ‘is the father of all things.’ It was certainly the father of the bond market. In Pieter van der Heyden’s extraordinary engraving, The Battle about Money, piggy banks, money bags, barrels of coins, and treasure chests – most of them heavily armed with swords, knives and lances – attack each other in a chaotic free-for-all. The Dutch verses below the engraving say: ‘It’s all for money and goods, this fighting and quarrelling.’ But what the inscription could equally well have said is: ‘This fighting is possible only if you can raise the money to pay for it.’ The ability to finance war through a market for government debt was, like so much else in financial history, an invention of the Italian Renaissance.

彼得·范·德·海登仿老彼得·勃鲁盖尔,《金钱之战》,1570 年后。荷兰语题词写道:“这一切都是为了金钱和货物,这场争斗和争吵。”

Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Battle about Money, after 1570. The Dutch inscription reads: ‘It’s all for money and goods, this fighting and quarrelling.’

在十四世纪和十五世纪的大部分时间里,托斯卡纳的中世纪城邦——佛罗伦萨、比萨和锡耶纳——彼此之间或与其他意大利城镇交战。这场战争与其说是靠武力,不如说是靠金钱。为了避免让本国公民承担肮脏的战斗任务,每个城市都雇佣军事承包商(雇佣兵)来组建军队,以吞并土地并掠夺对手的财物。在这些雇佣兵中……在14世纪60年代和70年代,有一位人物鹤立鸡群,鹤立鸡群。他威严的身影至今仍可见于佛罗伦萨大教堂的墙壁上——这幅画作最初是由感恩的佛罗伦萨民众委托绘制,以表彰他“无与伦比的领导才能”。尽管听起来难以置信,这位雇佣兵大师却是一位出生于埃塞克斯郡西布尔·赫丁汉的男孩。约翰·霍克伍德爵士为意大利人征战沙场,技艺精湛,以至于意大利人称他为“乔瓦尼·阿库托” (Giovanni Acuto ),意为“锐利的约翰”。佛罗伦萨人为了感谢他的功绩,将佛罗伦萨城外的蒙泰基奥城堡(Castello di Montecchio)等众多地产赠予了他。然而,霍克伍德终究是一位雇佣兵,他愿意为任何愿意付钱的人而战,包括米兰、帕多瓦、比萨,甚至是教皇。佛罗伦萨旧宫(Palazzo Vecchio)中精美的壁画描绘了1364年比萨和佛罗伦萨军队交战的场景,当时霍克伍德正效力于比萨一方。然而,十五年后,他却转而效力于佛罗伦萨,并在那里度过了余下的军旅生涯。为什么?因为佛罗伦萨有钱。

For much of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the medieval city-states of Tuscany – Florence, Pisa and Siena – were at war with each other or with other Italian towns. This was war waged as much by money as by men. Rather than require their own citizens to do the dirty work of fighting, each city hired military contractors (condottieri) who raised armies to annex land and loot treasure from its rivals. Among the condottieri of the 1360s and 1370s one stood head and shoulders above the others. His commanding figure can still be seen on the walls of Florence’s Duomo – a painting originally commissioned by a grateful Florentine public as a tribute to his ‘incomparable leadership’. Unlikely though it may seem, this master mercenary was an Essex boy born and raised in Sible Hedingham. So skilfully did Sir John Hawkwood wage war on their behalf that the Italians called him Giovanni Acuto, John the Acute. The Castello di Montecchio outside Florence was one of many pieces of real estate the Florentines gave him as a reward for his services. Yet Hawkwood was a mercenary, who was willing to fight for anyone who would pay him, including Milan, Padua, Pisa or the pope. Dazzling frescos in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio show the armies of Pisa and Florence clashing in 1364, at a time when Hawkwood was fighting for Pisa. Fifteen years later, however, he had switched to serve Florence, and spent the rest of his military career in that city’s employ. Why? Because Florence was where the money was.

连年征战的代价使意大利城邦陷入危机。即使在和平年代,支出也高达税收收入的两倍。为了支付像霍克伍德这样的巨额债务,佛罗伦萨深陷赤字泥潭。托斯卡纳国家档案馆的记录至今仍清晰地展现了这座城市的债务负担如何从十四世纪初的五万弗罗林飙升至1427年的五百万弗罗林,增长了百倍之多。 2这简直就是一座债务山——因此得名“蒙特公社”(monte commune),意为“公社债务山”。3到十五世纪初,借贷资金几乎占到该市收入的70%。这座“债务山”相当于佛罗伦萨经济年产值的一半以上。

The cost of incessant war had plunged Italy’s city-states into crisis. Expenditures even in years of peace were running at double tax revenues. To pay the likes of Hawkwood, Florence was drowning in deficits. You can still see in the records of the Tuscan State Archives how the city’s debt burden increased a hundred-fold from 50,000 florins at the beginning of the fourteenth century to 5 million by 1427.2 It was literally a mountain of debt – hence its name: the monte commune or communal debt mountain.3 By the early fifteenth century, borrowed money accounted for nearly 70 per cent of the city’s revenue. The ‘mountain’ was equivalent to more than half the Florentine economy’s annual output.

佛罗伦萨人究竟从哪里借到了如此巨额的资金?答案是:他们自己。富裕的市民无需缴纳房产税,而是被迫向市政府借钱。作为这些强制贷款(prestanze)的回报,他们可以获得利息。严格来说,这并非高利贷(正如我们所见,高利贷是被禁止的)。教会)因为贷款是强制性的;因此,利息支付可以按照教会法进行协调,作为对强制投资所产生的实际或假定成本的补偿(damnum emergens)。正如苏萨的霍斯蒂恩西斯(或亨利)在1270年左右所说:

From whom could the Florentines possibly have borrowed such a huge sum? The answer is from themselves. Instead of paying a property tax, wealthier citizens were effectively obliged to lend money to their own city government. In return for these forced loans (prestanze), they received interest. Technically, this was not usury (which, as we have seen, was banned by the Church) since the loans were obligatory; interest payments could therefore be reconciled with canon law as compensation (damnum emergens) for the real or putative costs arising from a compulsory investment. As Hostiensis (or Henry) of Susa put it in around 1270:

如果某个商人,惯于从事贸易和集市交易并从中获利,出于善心,借给我这个急需用钱的人,而他原本打算用这笔钱做生意,那么我仍然感激他的利益[注意“利益”一词的早期用法]…… 4

If some merchant, who is accustomed to pursue trade and the commerce of fairs, and there profit from, has, out of charity to me, who needs it badly, lent money with which he would have done business, I remain obliged to his interesse [note this early use of the term ‘interest’] . . .4

佛罗伦萨体系的一个关键特点是,如果投资者需要现金,这类贷款可以卖给其他公民;换句话说,它们是相对流动性强的资产,尽管当时的债券只不过是皮面账簿上的几行文字而已。

A crucial feature of the Florentine system was that such loans could be sold to other citizens if an investor needed ready money; in other words, they were relatively liquid assets, even though the bonds at this time were no more than a few lines in a leather-bound ledger.

因此,佛罗伦萨实际上将市民变成了最大的投资者。到十四世纪初,三分之二的家庭都以这种方式为公共债务做出了贡献,尽管大部分认购款项来自几千名富裕人士。5美奇家族在《供职名录》(Ruolo delle prestanze)中的记录不仅证明了他们当时的财富规模,也证明了他们对城邦国库的贡献程度。这一体系运作如此成功的原因之一是,他们和其他一些富裕家族也控制着城邦政府,从而掌控着财政。这种寡头权力结构为债券市场提供了坚实的政治基础。与不受约束的世袭君主不同,后者可能会随意违背偿还债权人的承诺,佛罗伦萨债券的发行者在很大程度上就是债券的购买者。因此,他们自然非常希望确保自己的利益得到保障。

In effect, then, Florence turned its citizens into its biggest investors. By the early fourteenth century, two thirds of households had contributed in this way to financing the public debt, though the bulk of subscriptions were accounted for by a few thousand wealthy individuals.5 The Medici entries in the ‘Ruolo delle prestanze’ testify not only to the scale of their wealth at this time, but also to the extent of their contributions to the city-state’s coffers. One reason that this system worked so well was that they and a few other wealthy families also controlled the city’s government and hence its finances. This oligarchical power structure gave the bond market a firm political foundation. Unlike an unaccountable hereditary monarch, who might arbitrarily renege on his promises to pay his creditors, the people who issued the bonds in Florence were in large measure the same people who bought them. Not surprisingly, they therefore had a strong interest in seeing that their interest was paid.

然而,以这种方式发动的无谓战争的数量终究是有限的。意大利城市的债务越大,它们需要偿还的债券就越多。发行债券越多,违约风险就越大。事实上,威尼斯早在12世纪末就建立了一套公共债务体系,比佛罗伦萨还要早。这套被称为“蒙特·韦基奥”( monte vecchio,意为“旧山”)的综合债务体系,在为威尼斯14世纪与热那亚和其他竞争对手的战争提供资金方面发挥了关键作用。1463年至1479年间与土耳其人的旷日持久的战争之后,又出现了一座新的债务山:蒙特·努沃(monte nuovo)。 6 投资者每年可获得5%的利息,利息由威尼斯各种消费税(例如对食盐等消费品征收的税款)支付,每年两次。与佛罗伦萨的“普雷斯坦泽”(prestanze )类似,威尼斯的“普雷斯蒂蒂”(prestiti)也是强制性贷款,但它有一个二级市场,允许投资者将债券出售给其他投资者以换取现金。7然而,在十五世纪后期,一系列威尼斯军事挫败极大地削弱了普雷斯蒂蒂债券的市场。1497年,威尼斯新蒙特债券的价格为80(比面值低20%),到1500年仅值52,到1502年底回升至75,随后在1509年从102暴跌至40。在1509年至1529年的低谷时期,旧蒙特债券的售价仅为3,新蒙特债券的售价仅为10。8

Nevertheless, there was a limit to how many more or less unproductive wars could be waged in this way. The larger the debts of the Italian cities became, the more bonds they had to issue; and the more bonds they issued, the greater the risk that they might default on their commitments. Venice had in fact developed a system of public debt even earlier than Florence, in the late twelfth century. The monte vecchio (Old Mountain) as the consolidated debt was known, played a key role in funding Venice’s fourteenth-century wars with Genoa and other rivals. A new mountain of debt arose after the protracted war with the Turks that raged between 1463 and 1479: the monte nuovo.6 Investors received annual interest of 5 per cent, paid twice yearly from the city’s various excise taxes (which were levied on articles of consumption like salt). Like the Florentine prestanze, the Venetian prestiti were forced loans, but with a secondary market which allowed investors to sell their bonds to other investors for cash.7 In the late fifteenth century, however, a series of Venetian military reverses greatly weakened the market for prestiti. Having stood at 80 (20 per cent below their face value) in 1497, the bonds of the Venetian monte nuovo were worth just 52 by 1500, recovering to 75 by the end of 1502 and then collapsing from 102 to 40 in 1509. At their low points in the years 1509 to 1529, monte vecchio sold at just 3 and monte nuovo at 10.8

现在,如果你在战乱时期购买政府债券,显然是在承担风险,即该国可能无法支付利息。另一方面,请记住,利息是按债券面值支付的,因此,如果你能以面值的10%购买一张票面利率为5%的债券,就能获得高达50%的收益。本质上,你期望的回报与你愿意承担的风险成正比。同时,正如我们所见,债券市场决定着整个经济体的利率。如果政府必须支付50%的利息,那么即使是信誉良好的商业借款人也可能需要支付某种战争溢价。1499年,威尼斯在伦巴第陆地和海上与奥斯曼帝国作战,同年爆发了严重的金融危机,债券价值暴跌,利率飙升,这绝非巧合。同样,1509年的债券市场暴跌也是战败的直接结果。威尼斯军队在阿尼亚德洛作战。结果都一样:商业活动完全停滞。

Now, if you buy a government bond while war is raging you are obviously taking a risk, the risk that the state in question may not pay your interest. On the other hand, remember that the interest is paid on the face value of the bond, so if you can buy a 5 per cent bond at just 10 per cent of its face value you can earn a handsome yield of 50 per cent. In essence, you expect a return proportional to the risk you are prepared to take. At the same time, as we have seen, it is the bond market that sets interest rates for the economy as a whole. If the state has to pay 50 per cent, then even reliable commercial borrowers are likely to pay some kind of war premium. It is no coincidence that the year 1499, when Venice was fighting both on land in Lombardy and at sea against the Ottoman Empire, saw a severe financial crisis as bonds crashed in value and interest rates soared.9 Likewise, the bond market rout of 1509 was a direct result of the defeat of the Venetian armies at Agnadello. The result in each case was the same: business ground to a halt.

促成债券市场兴起的并非只有意大利城邦。在北欧,城市政体也同样面临着如何在不触怒教会的情况下弥补财政赤字的难题。他们找到了一种略有不同的解决方案。尽管他们禁止收取贷款利息(互助贷款),但高利贷法并不适用于一种名为“普查斯” (census)的中世纪契约,这种契约允许一方从另一方购买一系列年度收益。13世纪,法国北部城镇如杜埃和加莱以及佛兰德斯城镇如根特开始发行此类年金。年金有两种形式:一种是永久年金(rentes heritableserfelijkrenten),购买者可以将其遗赠给继承人;另一种是终身年金(rentes viagèreslijfrenten),购买者去世后即终止。卖方(而非买方)有权通过偿还本金来赎回年金。到十六世纪中叶,年金销售收入约占荷兰省财政收入的7%。 10

It was not only the Italian city-states that contributed to the rise of the bond market. In Northern Europe, too, urban polities grappled with the problem of financing their deficits without falling foul of the Church. Here a somewhat different solution was arrived at. Though they prohibited the charging of interest on a loan (mutuum), the usury laws did not apply to the medieval contract known as the census, which allowed one party to buy a stream of annual payments from another. In the thirteenth century, such annuities started to be issued by northern French towns like Douai and Calais and Flemish towns like Ghent. They took one of two forms: rentes heritables or erfelijkrenten, perpetual revenue streams which the purchaser could bequeath to his heirs, or rentes viagères or lijfrenten, which ended with the purchaser’s death. The seller, but not the buyer, had the right to redeem the rente by repaying the principal. By the mid-sixteenth century, the sale of annuities was raising roughly 7 per cent of the revenues of the province of Holland.10

法国和西班牙王室都试图以同样的方式筹集资金,但他们都必须借助城镇作为中间人。在法国,资金由巴黎市政厅代表君主筹集​​;在西班牙,皇家债务则必须通过热那亚的圣乔治之家(一个购买了城市税收征收权的私人财团)和安特卫普的证券交易所(现代股票市场的前身)进行销售然而,投资皇家债务的投资者必须保持警惕。城镇由于其寡头统治形式和地方债务,有动力避免违约,但对于专制君主而言,情况并非如此。正如我们在第一章中所看到的,西班牙王室在十六世纪末和十七世纪屡次拖欠债务,分别在1557年、1560年、1575年、1596年、1607年、1627年、1647年、1652年和1662年全部或部分停止向债权人支付款项。 11

Both the French and Spanish crowns sought to raise money in the same way, but they had to use towns as intermediaries. In the French case, funds were raised on behalf of the monarch by the Paris hôtel de ville; in the Spanish case, royal juros had to be marketed through Genoa’s Casa di San Giorgio (a private syndicate that purchased the right to collect the city’s taxes) and Antwerp’s beurs, a forerunner of the modern stock market. Yet investors in royal debt had to be wary. Whereas towns, with their oligarchical forms of rule and locally held debts, had incentives not to default, the same was not true of absolute rulers. As we saw in Chapter 1, the Spanish crown became a serial defaulter in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, wholly or partially suspending payments to creditors in 1557, 1560, 1575, 1596, 1607, 1627, 1647, 1652 and 1662.11

西班牙财政困境的部分原因是镇压尼德兰北部叛乱省份耗资巨大且最终失败,这些省份曾发动反抗。西班牙的统治是荷兰金融和政治史上的一个分水岭。凭借其共和制度,荷兰联合省兼具城邦的优势和民族国家的规模。他们通过将阿姆斯特丹发展成为各种新型证券的市场来筹集战争资金:不仅包括人寿保险和永久年金,还包括彩票贷款(投资者购买的是获得高额回报的概率)。到1650年,荷兰已有超过65000名食利者,他们将资本投资于这些债务工具,从而为荷兰漫长的独立斗争提供了资金支持。随着荷兰从自卫转向帝国扩张,其债务也如山般高涨,从1632年的5000万荷兰盾飙升至1752年的2.5亿荷兰盾。然而,荷兰债券的收益率却稳步下降,到1747年跌至仅2.5%的低点——这不仅表明联合省资本充裕,也表明投资者几乎不担心荷兰会彻底违约。 12

Part of the reason for Spain’s financial difficulties was the extreme costliness of trying and failing to bring to heel the rebellious provinces of the northern Netherlands, whose revolt against Spanish rule was a watershed in financial as well as political history. With their republican institutions, the United Provinces combined the advantages of the city-state with the scale of a nation-state. They were able to finance their wars by developing Amsterdam as the market for a whole range of new securities: not only life and perpetual annuities, but also lottery loans (whereby investors bought a small probability of a large return). By 1650 there were more than 65,000 Dutch rentiers, men who had invested their capital in one or other of these debt instruments and thereby helped finance the long Dutch struggle to preserve their independence. As the Dutch progressed from self-defence to imperial expansion, their debt mountain grew high indeed, from 50 million guilders in 1632 to 250 million in 1752. Yet the yield on Dutch bonds declined steadily, to a low of just 2.5 per cent in 1747 – a sign not only that capital was abundant in the United Provinces, but also that investors had little fear of an outright Dutch default.12

1688年的光荣革命推翻了信奉天主教的詹姆斯二世,拥立信奉新教的荷兰奥兰治亲王为王,这些以及其他改革措施也随之从阿姆斯特丹跨越英吉利海峡传入伦敦。英国的财政体系早已与欧洲大陆的君主制国家截然不同。英国王室拥有的土地比其他地方更早被出售,这增强了议会控制王室开支的权力,而当时议会在西班牙、法国和德意志地区的权力却日渐式微。英国的公务员队伍也开始朝着职业化方向发展,依靠薪俸而非封建领地。光荣革命进一步强化了这种差异。从此以后,不会再出现频繁的违约(1672年查理二世因王室负债累累而暂停支付账单的“停止财政”事件,至今仍令伦敦的投资者记忆犹新)。货币贬值的情况将不再发生,尤其是在1717年采用金本位制之后。议会将对王室财政进行审查。而且,将持续努力巩固……斯图亚特王朝多年来积累的各种债务,最终在1749年由亨利·佩勒姆爵士创立了统一基金*13这与法国的财政方向截然相反。在法国,违约事件频发;政府出售官职以筹集资金,而不是用于扩充公务员队伍;税收征管私有化或外包;预算稀少且难以理解;三级会议(法国最接近议会的机构)停止召开;历任财政总监竭力通过发行租金年金(以一群人的生命为担保的年金)来筹集资金,而这些年金的条款对投资者来说过于优厚。 14到18世纪中叶,伦敦的债券市场蓬勃发展,政府永久债券是交易的主要证券,这些债券流动性极高——换句话说,易于出售——并且对外国(尤其是荷兰)投资者极具吸引力。15与之相反,巴黎却并非如此。这种金融上的分歧最终被证明会产生深远的政治影响。

With the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which ousted the Catholic James II from the English throne in favour of the Dutch Protestant Prince of Orange, these and other innovations crossed the English Channel from Amsterdam to London. The English fiscal system was already significantly different from that of the continental monarchies. The lands owned by the crown had been sold off earlier than elsewhere, increasing the power of parliaments to control royal expenditure at a time when their powers were waning in Spain, France and the German lands. There was already an observable move in the direction of a professional civil service, reliant on salaries rather than peculation. The Glorious Revolution accentuated this divergence. From now on there would be no more regular defaulting (the ‘Stop of Exchequer’ of 1672, when, with the crown deep in debt, Charles II had suspended payment of his bills, was still fresh in the memories of London investors). There would be no more debasement of the coinage, particularly after the adoption of the gold standard in 1717. There would be parliamentary scrutiny of royal finances. And there would be a sustained effort to consolidate the various debts that the Stuart dynasty had incurred over the years, a process that culminated in 1749 with the creation by Sir Henry Pelham of the Consolidated Fund*.13 This was the very opposite of the financial direction taken in France, where defaults continued to happen regularly; offices were sold to raise money rather than to staff the civil service; tax collection was privatized or farmed out; budgets were rare and scarcely intelligible; the Estates General (the nearest thing to a French parliament) had ceased to meet; and successive controllers-general struggled to raise money by issuing rentes and tontines (annuities sold on the lives of groups of people) on terms that were excessively generous to investors.14 In London by the mid-eighteenth century there was a thriving bond market, in which government consols were the dominant securities traded, bonds that were highly liquid – in other words easy to sell – and attractive to foreign (especially Dutch) investors.15 In Paris, by contrast, there was no such thing. It was a financial divergence that would prove to have profound political consequences.


由于它堪称史上最成功的债券,因此值得我们仔细研究一下著名的英国永久债券。到了十八世纪末,人们可以投资两种类型的永久债券:一种票面利率为3%,另一种票面利率为5%。除此之外,它们完全相同,都是永续债券,没有固定的到期日,只有当其市场价格等于或超过面值时,政府才能回购(赎回)。第72页的插图展示了一张典型的永久债券收据,收据部分为印刷体,部分为手写体,上面注明了投资金额、债券面值、投资者姓名和日期:

Since it was arguably the most successful bond ever issued, it is worth pausing to look more closely at the famed British consol. By the late eighteenth century it was possible to invest in two types: those bearing a 3 per cent coupon, and those bearing a 5 per cent coupon. They were otherwise identical, in that they were perpetual bonds, without a fixed maturity date, which could be bought back (redeemed) by the government only if their market price equalled or exceeded their face value (par). The illustration on page 72 shows a typical consol, a partially printed, partially handwritten receipt, stating the amount invested, the face value of the security, the investor’s name and the date:

1796年1月22日收到安娜·霍斯夫人汇来的101英镑。1785年7月6日合并的百分之五年金的资本或股份的对价为一百英镑……可在英格兰银行转让……

Received this 22 Day of January 1796 of Mrs. Anna Hawes the Sum of One hundred and one pounds being the Consideration for One hundred pounds Interest or Share in the Capital or Joint Stock of Five per Cent Annuities, consolidated July 6th, 1785 . . . transferable at the Bank of England . . .

安娜·霍斯于1796年1月购买的5%永久债券

A 5 per cent consol purchased by Anna Hawes in January 1796

鉴于霍斯夫人以101英镑的价格购买了一张面值100英镑的永久债券,她的投资年收益率为4.95%。但这笔投资的时机并不理想。同年4月,由一位名叫拿破仑·波拿巴的年轻科西嘉指挥官率领的法军在蒙特诺特取得了首场胜利。5月,他又在洛迪再次获胜。在接下来的二十年里,这个人对大英帝国的安全和财政稳定,乃至欧洲和平构成的威胁,比所有哈布斯堡王朝和波旁王朝加起来还要大。击败他会导致又一座债务山峰的堆积。随着债务山峰的不断攀升,个人永久债券的价格也随之下跌——在英国国运最衰落的时候,跌幅高达30%。

Given that she paid £101 for a £100 consol, Mrs Hawes was securing an annual yield on her investment of 4.95 per cent. This was not an especially well-timed investment. April that year saw the first victory at Montenotte of a French army led by a young Corsican commander named Napoleon Bonaparte. He won again at Lodi in May. For the next two decades, this man would pose a greater threat to the security and financial stability of the British Empire, not to mention the peace of Europe, than all the Habsburgs and Bourbons put together. Defeating him would lead to the rise of yet another mountain of debt. And as the mountain rose, so the price of individual consols declined – by as much as 30 per cent at the lowest point in Britain’s fortunes.

一位身材矮小的科西嘉人迅速崛起,成为法兰西皇帝和欧洲大陆的统治者,这在历史上极为罕见。1796年,谁也无法预料到这一切,安娜·霍斯夫人更是如此。然而,几乎在同一时期,一场更为非凡(也更为持久)的社会流动奇迹即将上演。在拿破仑滑铁卢战役最终战败后的短短几年内,一位在法兰克福贫民窟阴暗环境中长大的男子,摇身一变,成为金融界的拿破仑:债券市场的掌控者,甚至有人大胆断言,他也是欧洲政治的掌控者。这个人名叫内森·罗斯柴尔德。

The meteoric rise of a diminutive Corsican to be Emperor of France and master of the European continent was an event few could have predicted in 1796, least of all Mrs Anna Hawes. Yet an even more remarkable (and more enduring) feat of social mobility was to happen in almost exactly the same timeframe. Within just a few years of Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo, a man who had grown up amid the gloom of the Frankfurt ghetto had emerged as a financial Bonaparte: the master of the bond market and, some ventured to suggest, the master of European politics as well. That man’s name was Nathan Rothschild.

金融界的波拿巴

The Bonaparte of Finance

他拥有无尽的财富,自诩为和平与战争的仲裁者,国家的信誉都取决于他的点头;他的通讯员数不胜数;他的信使比君主和专制君主的信使还要快;国家大臣都受他收买。他在欧洲大陆各国的内阁中占据至高无上的地位,如今又觊觎我们自己的内阁。16

Master of unbounded wealth, he boasts that he is the arbiter of peace and war, and that the credit of nations depends upon his nod; his correspondents are innumerable; his couriers outrun those of sovereign princes, and absolute sovereigns; ministers of state are in his pay. Paramount in the cabinets of continental Europe, he aspires to the domination of our own.16

这些话是激进派议员托马斯·邓科姆于1828年说的。他所指的人是内森·梅耶·罗斯柴尔德,他是伦敦分行的创始人,而这家银行在19世纪的大部分时间里都是世界上最大的银行。 17正是债券市场让罗斯柴尔德家族变得富有——富裕到足以在欧洲各地建造41座庄园,其中包括位于白金汉郡的沃德斯登庄园。这座庄园由第四代罗斯柴尔德勋爵——内森的曾曾曾孙——修复,重现了昔日的辉煌。据罗斯柴尔德勋爵描述,他这位杰出的先祖“身材矮胖,性格固执,极其聪明,一心扑在事业上……我很难想象和他打交道会是什么愉快的事。”他的堂妹伊芙琳·德·罗斯柴尔德也持类似观点。 “我认为他很有野心,”他一边说着,一边凝视着挂在伦敦圣斯威辛巷罗斯柴尔德家族公司会议室里的内森·罗斯柴尔德的画像,“而且我认为他意志非常坚定。我认为他不会轻易容忍愚蠢之人。”

Those words were spoken in 1828 by the Radical MP Thomas Duncombe. The man he was referring to was Nathan Mayer Rothschild, founder of the London branch of what was, for most of the nineteenth century, the biggest bank in the world.17 It was the bond market that made the Rothschild family rich – rich enough to build forty-one stately homes all over Europe, among them Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, which has been restored in all its gilded glory by the 4th Lord Rothschild, Nathan’s great-great-great-grandson. His illustrious forebear, according to Lord Rothschild, was ‘short, fat, obsessive, extremely clever, wholly focused . . . I can’t imagine he would have been a very pleasant person to have dealings with.’ His cousin Evelyn de Rothschild takes a similar view. ‘I think he was very ambitious,’ he says, contemplating Nathan Rothschild’s portrait in the boardroom at the offices of N. M. Rothschild in London’s St Swithin’s Lane, ‘and I think he was very determined. I don’t think he suffered fools lightly.’

尽管罗斯柴尔德家族成员通信频繁,但内森写给兄弟们的信件却相对较少流传至今。然而,其中有一页信件清晰地展现了他的为人。这封信和他们所有的信件一样,是用几乎无法辨认的犹太德语(德语转写成希伯来字母)写成的,它体现了他所谓的犹太人的职业道德,以及他对那些性情较为温和的兄弟们的不耐烦:

Though the Rothschilds were compulsive correspondents, relatively few of Nathan’s letters to his brothers have survived. There is one page, however, that clearly conveys the kind of man he was. Written, like all their letters, in almost indecipherable Judendeutsch (German transliterated into Hebrew characters), it epitomizes what might be called his Jewish work ethic and his impatience with his less mercurial brothers:

我写信给你,表达我的意见,因为给你写信是我的职责所在……你的来信我读了不下百遍,你完全可以想象。晚饭后我通常无所事事。我不读书,不打牌,也不去剧院,我唯一的乐趣就是处理生意,所以我会读阿姆谢尔、萨洛蒙、詹姆斯和卡尔的来信……至于卡尔的信(关于在法兰克福买更大的房子)……这一切都是无稽之谈,因为只要我们生意兴隆、财源广进,人人都会奉承我们,而那些对我们毫无兴趣的人则会因此对我们心怀嫉妒。我们的萨洛蒙为人太好,太随和了,只要有个寄生虫在他耳边说了些什么,他就会觉得所有人都心胸宽广;事实上,他们追求的只是自己的利益。18

I am writing to you giving my opinion, as it is my damned duty to write to you . . . I am reading through your letters not just once but maybe a hundred times. You can well imagine that yourself. After dinner I usually have nothing to do. I do not read books, I do not play cards, I do not go to the theatre, my only pleasure is my business and in this way I read Amschel’s, Salomon’s, James’s and Carl’s letters . . . As far as Carl’s letter [about buying a bigger house in Frankfurt] is concerned . . . all this is a lot of nonsense because as long as we have good business and are rich everybody will flatter us and those who have no interest in obtaining revenues through us begrudge us for it all. Our Salomon is too good and agreeable to anything and anybody and if a parasite whispers something into his ear he thinks that all human beings are noble minded[;] the truth is that all they are after is their own interest.18

难怪他的兄弟们称内森为“总司令”。“你写的都是些什么啊,”所罗门在1815年疲惫地抱怨道,“付这个,付那个,寄这个,寄那个。” 19正是这种惊人的干劲,加上与生俱来的金融天赋,推动内森从法兰克福犹太街的默默无闻一跃成为伦敦债券市场的主宰。然而,战争再次为金融创新提供了契机。

Small wonder his brothers called Nathan ‘the general in chief’. ‘All you ever write’, complained Salomon wearily in 1815, ‘is pay this, pay that, send this, send that.’19 It was this phenomenal drive, allied to innate financial genius, that propelled Nathan from the obscurity of the Frankfurt Judengasse to mastery of the London bond market. Once again, however, the opportunity for financial innovation was provided by war.


1815年6月18日清晨,在威灵顿公爵的指挥下,67000名英国、荷兰和德国士兵……在距离布鲁塞尔不远的滑铁卢战场上,英法两国军队迎战人数几乎相当的法军,后者由法国皇帝拿破仑·波拿巴指挥。滑铁卢战役是英法两国二十多年来断断续续冲突的最终决战。但这不仅仅是一场两军之战,更是两种截然不同的金融体系之间的较量:一种是法国的金融体系,在拿破仑统治下,其基础是掠夺(对被征服者的征税);另一种是英国的金融体系,其基础是债务。

On the morning of 18 June 1815, 67,000 British, Dutch and German troops under the Duke of Wellington’s command looked out across the fields of Waterloo, not far from Brussels, towards an almost equal number of French troops commanded by the French Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte. The Battle of Waterloo was the culmination of more than two decades of intermittent conflict between Britain and France. But it was more than a battle between two armies. It was also a contest between rival financial systems: one, the French, which under Napoleon had come to be based on plunder (the taxation of the conquered); the other, the British, based on debt.

历史上从未有过如此大规模的债券发行,用于资助一场军事冲突。1793年至1815年间,英国国债增长了三倍,达到7.45亿英镑,是英国经济年产值的两倍多。但债券供应量的激增给伦敦市场带来了沉重压力。自1792年2月以来,一张面值100英镑、票面利率3%的典型永久债券价格从96英镑跌至滑铁卢战役前夕的60英镑以下,甚至一度(1797年)跌破50英镑。对于像安娜·霍斯夫人这样的人来说,那段时期无疑是艰难的。

Never had so many bonds been issued to finance a military conflict. Between 1793 and 1815 the British national debt increased by a factor of three, to £745 million, more than double the annual output of the UK economy. But this increase in the supply of bonds had weighed heavily on the London market. Since February 1792, the price of a typical £100 3 per cent consol had fallen from £96 to below £60 on the eve of Waterloo, at one time (in 1797) sinking below £50. These were trying times for the likes of Mrs Anna Hawes.

根据一个流传已久的传说,罗斯柴尔德家族最初的巨额财富源于内森·罗斯柴尔德对战役结果如何影响英国债券价格的成功投机。在一些版本的故事中,内森亲眼目睹了这场战役,冒着英吉利海峡风暴的风险赶在惠灵顿公爵胜利的官方消息发布前抵达伦敦,并通过在债券价格飙升前买入,从中获利2000万至1.35亿英镑。纳粹后来竭力夸大这个传说。1940年,约瑟夫·戈培尔批准出版了《罗斯柴尔德家族》,书中描绘了油滑的内森贿赂一位法国将军以确保惠灵顿公爵的胜利,然后故意在伦敦谎报战果,引发英国债券的恐慌性抛售,之后他以极低的价格大量买入。然而,事实却截然不同。罗斯柴尔德家族非但没有从惠灵顿的胜利中获利,反而几乎因此破产。他们的财富并非源于滑铁卢战役,而是尽管经历了滑铁卢战役才获得的。

According to a long-standing legend, the Rothschild family owed the first millions of their fortune to Nathan’s successful speculation about the effect of the outcome of the battle on the price of British bonds. In some versions of the story, Nathan witnessed the battle himself, risked a Channel storm to reach London ahead of the official news of Wellington’s victory and, by buying bonds ahead of a huge surge in prices, pocketed between £20 and £135 million. It was a legend the Nazis later did their best to embroider. In 1940 Joseph Goebbels approved the release of Die Rothschilds, which depicts an oleaginous Nathan bribing a French general to ensure the Duke of Wellington’s victory, and then deliberately misreporting the outcome in London in order to precipitate panic selling of British bonds, which he then snaps up at bargain-basement prices. Yet the reality was altogether different.20 Far from making money from Wellington’s victory, the Rothschilds were very nearly ruined by it. Their fortune was made not because of Waterloo, but despite it.

在一系列失误的干预之后,英国军队……自1808年8月起,英国便在欧洲大陆与拿破仑作战。当时,未来的威灵顿公爵,时任陆军中将的阿瑟·韦尔斯利爵士率领远征军进驻葡萄牙。葡萄牙在前一年刚刚被法国入侵。在接下来的六年里,英国政府需要反复向伊比利亚半岛运送人员和物资。向公众出售债券无疑为英国政府筹集了大量资金,但纸币在遥远的战场上几乎毫无用处。为了给军队提供补给,并支付英国盟友对抗法国的费用,威灵顿需要一种普遍接受的货币。挑战在于如何将债券市场筹集的资金兑换成金币,并将其运送到需要的地方。在战时,从伦敦向里斯本运送金几尼既昂贵又危险。但当葡萄牙商人拒绝接受威灵顿提供的汇票时,似乎除了运送现金之外别无选择。

After a series of miscued interventions, British troops had been fighting against Napoleon on the Continent since August 1808, when the future Duke of Wellington, then Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Wellesley, led an expeditionary force to Portugal, invaded by the French the previous year. For the better part of the next six years, there would be a recurrent need to get men and matériel to the Iberian Peninsula. Selling bonds to the public had certainly raised plenty of cash for the British government, but banknotes were of little use on distant battlefields. To provision the troops and pay Britain’s allies against France, Wellington needed a currency that was universally acceptable. The challenge was to transform the money raised on the bond market into gold coins, and to get them to where they were needed. Sending gold guineas from London to Lisbon was expensive and hazardous in time of war. But when the Portuguese merchants declined to accept the bills of exchange that Wellington proffered, there seemed little alternative but to ship cash.

内森·罗斯柴尔德的父亲是法兰克福一位小有名气的古董商兼票据经纪人。他于1799年才抵达英国,并在接下来的十年里大部分时间都待在英格兰北部新兴的工业区,收购纺织品并运回德国。直到1811年,他才开始在伦敦从事银行业。那么,为什么英国政府会在财政危难之际求助于他呢?答案是,内森曾有过丰富的走私黄金到欧洲大陆的经验,他突破了拿破仑对英国与欧洲之间贸易的封锁。 (诚​​然,法国当局对此违规行为往往睁一只眼闭一只眼,他们秉持着一种简单化的重商主义观点,认为英国黄金外流必然会削弱英国的战争力量。)1814年1月,财政大臣授权总督约翰·查尔斯·赫里斯“以最秘密的方式雇用那位先生[内森]在德国、法国和荷兰收集尽可能多的法国金银币,总价值不超过60万英镑,且必须在两个月内完成。”这些金银币随后将被运送到英国船只上。这笔款项被运往荷兰的赫尔沃茨卢伊斯港,并转交给惠灵顿,此时惠灵顿已翻越比利牛斯山脉进入法国。这是一项规模庞大的行动,取决于罗斯柴尔德兄弟能否利用其跨海峡的信贷网络,并管理大规模的金银转移。他们出色地完成了任务,惠灵顿很快便写信表达了对“充足的……资金”的感激之情。正如赫里斯所说:“此地的罗斯柴尔德先生出色地完成了委托给他的各项任务,尽管他是犹太人,但我们对他非常信任。”到1814年5月,内森已向政府预付了近120万英镑,是最初委托金额的两倍。

The son of a moderately successful Frankfurt antique dealer and bill broker, Nathan Rothschild had arrived in England only in 1799 and had spent most of the next ten years in the newly industrializing North of England, purchasing textiles and shipping them back to Germany. He did not go into the banking business in London until 1811. Why, then, did the British government turn to him in its hour of financial need? The answer is that Nathan had acquired valuable experience as a smuggler of gold to the Continent, in breach of the blockade that Napoleon had imposed on trade between England and Europe. (Admittedly, it was a breach the French authorities tended to wink at, in the simplistic mercantilist belief that outflows of gold from England must tend to weaken the British war effort.) In January 1814, the Chancellor of the Exchequer authorized the Commissary-in-Chief, John Charles Herries, to ‘employ that gentleman [Nathan] in the most secret and confidential manner to collect in Germany, France and Holland the largest quantity of French gold and silver coins, not exceeding in value £600,000, which he may be able to procure within two months from the present time.’ These were then to be delivered to British vessels at the Dutch port of Helvoetsluys and sent on to Wellington, who had by now crossed the Pyrenees into France. It was an immense operation, which depended on the brothers’ ability to tap their cross-Channel credit network and to manage large-scale bullion transfers. They executed their commission so well that Wellington was soon writing to express his gratitude for the ‘ample . . . supplies of money’. As Herries put it: ‘Rothschild of this place has executed the various services entrusted to him in this line admirably well, and though a Jew [sic], we place a good deal of confidence in him.’ By May 1814 Nathan had advanced nearly £1.2 million to the government, double the amount envisaged in his original instructions.

即使在战争末期,调动如此庞大的黄金数量无疑风险极大。然而,从罗斯柴尔德家族的角度来看,他们能够收取的巨额佣金足以弥补这些风险。他们之所以如此胜任这项任务,是因为兄弟五人拥有现成的家族银行网络——内森在伦敦,阿姆谢尔在法兰克福,詹姆斯(最小的弟弟)在巴黎,卡尔在阿姆斯特丹,而所罗门则随内森的安排四处奔波。这五位罗斯柴尔德家族成员分散在欧洲各地,占据了独特的优势,可以利用不同市场之间的价格和汇率差异进行套利。例如,如果巴黎的黄金价格高于伦敦,那么在巴黎的詹姆斯就会将黄金出售换成汇票,然后将汇票寄往伦敦,内森再用这些汇票购买更多黄金。他们代表赫里斯进行的交易规模庞大,足以影响这种价格差异,这无疑进一步增加了这项业务的利润。此外,罗斯柴尔德家族还经手了支付给英国欧洲大陆盟国的一些巨额补贴。据赫里斯估计,到1814年6月,他们已支付了价值1260万法郎的此类款项。首相利物浦勋爵评论道:“罗斯柴尔德先生已成为一位非常有用的朋友。”正如他告诉外交大臣卡斯尔雷勋爵的那样,“如果没有他,我真不知道我们该怎么办……”此时,他的兄弟们已经开始称内森为“证券交易所之王”。

Mobilizing such vast amounts of gold even at the tail end of a war was risky, no doubt. Yet from the Rothschilds’ point of view, the hefty commissions they were able to charge more than justified the risks. What made them so well suited to the task was that the brothers had a ready-made banking network within the family – Nathan in London, Amschel in Frankfurt, James (the youngest) in Paris, Carl in Amsterdam and Salomon roving wherever Nathan saw fit. Spread out around Europe, the five Rothschilds were uniquely positioned to exploit price and exchange rate differences between markets, the process known as arbitrage. If the price of gold was higher in, say, Paris than in London, James in Paris would sell gold for bills of exchange, then send these to London, where Nathan would use them to buy a larger quantity of gold. The fact that their own transactions on Herries’s behalf were big enough to affect such price differentials only added to the profitability of the business. In addition, the Rothschilds also handled some of the large subsidies paid to Britain’s continental allies. By June 1814, Herries calculated that they had effected payments of this sort to a value of 12.6 million francs. ‘Mr Rothschild’, remarked the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, had become ‘a very useful friend’. As he told the Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh, ‘I do not know what we should have done without him . . .’. By now his brothers had taken to calling Nathan the master of the Stock Exchange.

1814年4月退位后,拿破仑被流放到意大利的小岛厄尔巴岛,在那里他建立了一个微型帝国。然而,这个小岛太小,容不下他。1815年3月1日,令聚集在维也纳会议、旨在恢复旧欧洲秩序的君主和大臣们震惊的是,拿破仑重返法国,决心复兴他的帝国。大军老兵们纷纷响应他的号召。内森·罗斯柴尔德得知这一“坏消息”后,立即恢复了黄金收购,他和他的兄弟们尽可能地买下了所有能找到的金条和金币,并交给赫里斯,由赫里斯运往惠灵顿。罗斯柴尔德家族总共提供了价值超过200万英镑的金币——足以装满884个箱子和55个木桶。与此同时,内森主动提出为英国在欧洲大陆的盟友提供新一轮补贴,使得他1815年与赫里斯的交易总额接近980万英镑。所有这些交易的佣金在2%到6%之间,拿破仑的回归势必会让罗斯柴尔德家族暴富。然而,内森低估了一个风险。他疯狂购入如此巨量的黄金,以为这场战争会像拿破仑的所有战争一样旷日持久。这几乎是一个致命的误判。

After his abdication in April 1814, Napoleon had been exiled to the small Italian island of Elba, which he proceeded to rule as an empire in miniature. It was too small to hold him. On 1 March 1815, to the consternation of the monarchs and ministers gathered to restore the old European order at the Congress of Vienna, he returned to France, determined to revive his Empire. Veterans of the grande armée rallied to his standard. Nathan Rothschild responded to this ‘unpleasant news’ by immediately resuming gold purchases, buying up all the bullion and coins he and his brothers could lay their hands on, and making it available to Herries for shipment to Wellington. In all, the Rothschilds provided gold coins worth more than £2 million – enough to fill 884 boxes and fifty-five casks. At the same time, Nathan offered to take care of a fresh round of subsidies to Britain’s continental allies, bringing the total of his transactions with Herries in 1815 to just under £9.8 million. With commissions on all this business ranging from 2 to 6 per cent, Napoleon’s return promised to make the Rothschilds rich men. Yet there was a risk that Nathan had underestimated. In furiously buying up such a huge quantity of gold, he had assumed that, as with all Napoleon’s wars, this would be a long one. It was a near fatal miscalculation.

惠灵顿曾将滑铁卢战役称为“你一生中见过的最惊险的一战”。经过一天残酷的冲锋、反冲锋和英勇的防御,普鲁士军队姗姗来迟,最终决定了战局。对惠灵顿而言,这是一场辉煌的胜利。但对罗斯柴尔德家族来说却并非如此。毫无疑问,由于信使的快速传递,内森·罗斯柴尔德比亨利·珀西少校早了近48小时就收到了拿破仑战败的消息,这无疑令他感到欣慰。然而,无论消息传到他耳中的时间有多早,从内森的角度来看,这都绝非好消息。他没想到如此决定性的胜利会来得如此之快。如今,他和他的兄弟们坐拥一大笔无人需要的巨款——这笔钱原本是用来支付一场已经结束的战争的费用。随着和平的到来,那些曾与拿破仑作战的强大军队……联盟可能解散,盟军也可能瓦解。这意味着士兵的薪饷将不复存在,英国战时盟国的补贴也将停止。战时飙升的金价势必下跌。内森面临的不是传说中的巨额利润,而是不断扩大的巨额亏损。

Wellington famously called the Battle of Waterloo ‘the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’. After a day of brutal charges, countercharges and heroic defence, the belated arrival of the Prussian army finally proved decisive. For Wellington, it was a glorious victory. Not so for the Rothschilds. No doubt it was gratifying for Nathan Rothschild to receive the news of Napoleon’s defeat first, thanks to the speed of his couriers, nearly forty-eight hours before Major Henry Percy delivered Wellington’s official despatch to the Cabinet. No matter how early it reached him, however, the news was anything but good from Nathan’s point of view. He had expected nothing as decisive so soon. Now he and his brothers were sitting on top of a pile of cash that nobody needed – to pay for a war that was over. With the coming of peace, the great armies that had fought Napoleon could be disbanded, the coalition of allies dissolved. That meant no more soldiers’ wages and no more subsidies to Britain’s wartime allies. The price of gold, which had soared during the war, would be bound to fall. Nathan was faced not with the immense profits of legend but with heavy and growing losses.

但还有一条可能的出路:罗斯柴尔德家族可以利用他们的黄金在债券市场上进行一次规模巨大且风险极高的豪赌。1815年7月20日,《伦敦信使报》晚报报道,内森·罗斯柴尔德“大量买入股票”,也就是英国政府债券。内森的赌注是,滑铁卢战役的胜利以及政府借贷减少的前景将推高英国债券的价格。内森继续买入,随着永久债券价格如期上涨,他继续增持。尽管他的兄弟们极力劝说他兑现利润,内森还是坚持了一年之久。最终,在1817年末,债券价格上涨超过40%后,他才抛售了债券。考虑到通货膨胀和经济增长对英镑购买力的影响,他今天的利润相当于约6亿英镑。这是金融史上最胆大妄为的交易之一,它从拿破仑的军事失败中夺回了金融上的胜利。胜利者与失败者之间的相似之处,在当时的人们看来并非无稽之谈。正如罗斯柴尔德家族的劲敌巴林银行的一位合伙人所说:“我必须坦白承认,我没有胆量去效仿他的操作。他的操作通常计划周密,执行巧妙娴熟——但他在金融领域的成就,正如拿破仑在战争领域一样。” 21在德国作家路德维希·伯尔内看来,罗斯柴尔德家族简直就是“金融拿破仑”22 其他人则更进一步,尽管其中不乏讽刺意味。德国诗人海因里希·海涅在1841年3月宣称:“金钱是我们时代的上帝,而罗斯柴尔德就是他的先知。” 23

But there was one possible way out: the Rothschilds could use their gold to make a massive and hugely risky bet on the bond market. On 20 July 1815 the evening edition of the London Courier reported that Nathan had made ‘great purchases of stock’, meaning British government bonds. Nathan’s gamble was that the British victory at Waterloo, and the prospect of a reduction in government borrowing, would send the price of British bonds soaring upwards. Nathan bought more and, as the price of consols duly began to rise, he kept on buying. Despite his brothers’ desperate entreaties to realize profits, Nathan held his nerve for another year. Eventually, in late 1817, with bond prices up more than 40 per cent, he sold. Allowing for the effects on the purchasing power of sterling of inflation and economic growth, his profits were worth around £600 million today. It was one of the most audacious trades in financial history, one which snatched financial victory from the jaws of Napoleon’s military defeat. The resemblance between victor and vanquished was not lost on contemporaries. In the words of one of the partners at Barings, the Rothschilds’ great rivals, ‘I must candidly confess that I have not the nerve for his operations. They are generally well planned, with great cleverness and adroitness in execution – but he is in money and funds what Bonaparte was in war.’21 To the German writer Ludwig Boerne, the Rothschilds were simply die Finanzbonaparten.22 Others went still further, though not without a hint of irony. ‘Money is the god of our time,’ declared the German poet Heinrich Heine in March 1841, ‘and Rothschild is his prophet.’23


罗斯柴尔德家族在20世纪90年代后期对国际金融的主导地位,即使在今天看来也令人震惊。滑铁卢战役一百年后,这一成就令当时的世人惊叹不已,他们常常试图用神秘主义的语言来解释它。据一份可追溯至19世纪30年代的记载,罗斯柴尔德家族的财富源于他们拥有一件神秘的“希伯来护身符”,正是这件护身符使得伦敦罗斯柴尔德家族的创始人内森·罗斯柴尔德成为了“欧洲金融市场的巨头”。 24类似的故事在19世纪90年代仍在被限制居住的俄罗斯犹太人聚居区流传。 25正如我们所见,纳粹更倾向于将罗斯柴尔德家族的崛起归因于操纵股市新闻和其他不正当手段。此类谬论至今仍然存在。根据宋洪兵2007年在中国出版的畅销书《货币战争》,罗斯柴尔德家族通过其对美联储的所谓影响力,继续控制着全球货币体系。 26

To an extent that even today remains astonishing, the Rothschilds went on to dominate international finance in the half century after Waterloo. So extraordinary did this achievement seem to contemporaries that they often sought to explain it in mystical terms. According to one account dating from the 1830s, the Rothschilds owed their fortune to the possession of a mysterious ‘Hebrew talisman’ that enabled Nathan Rothschild, the founder of the London house, to become ‘the leviathan of the money markets of Europe’.24 Similar stories were being told in the Pale of Settlement, to which Russian Jews were confined, as late as the 1890s.25 As we have seen, the Nazis preferred to attribute the rise of the Rothschilds to the manipulation of stock market news and other sharp practice. Such myths are current even today. According to Song Hongbing’s best-selling book Currency Wars, published in China in 2007, the Rothschilds continue to control the global monetary system through their alleged influence over the Federal Reserve System.26

更为实际的事实是,罗斯柴尔德家族凭借在拿破仑战争后期取得的成功,巩固了其在日益国际化的伦敦债券市场中的主导地位。他们通过建立庞大的资本基础和信息网络实现了这一目标,这些优势很快就远远超过了其最接近的竞争对手巴林银行。据估计,在1815年至1859年间,这家伦敦公司发行了十四种不同的主权债券,面值近4300万英镑,超过伦敦所有银行发行总额的一半。 27虽然英国政府债券是他们向投资者推销的主要证券,但他们也出售法国、普鲁士、俄罗斯、奥地利、那不勒斯和巴西的债券。 28此外,自1830年以来,他们几乎垄断了比利时政府的债券发行。通常,罗斯柴尔德家族会直接从政府手中购买一批新债券,然后收取佣金,将这些债券分销给他们在欧洲各地的经纪人和投资者网络,只有在收到所有买家的款项后,才会将资金汇给政府。罗斯柴尔德家族支付给主权借款人的价格与他们向投资者索要的价格之间通常会有相当大的价差(在首次公开募股后,还有进一步提价的空间)。当然,正如我们所见,此前也曾出现过大规模的国际贷款,尤其是在热那亚、安特卫普和阿姆斯特丹。 29但1815年后伦敦债券市场的一个显著特点是,罗斯柴尔德家族坚持要求大多数新借款人发行以英镑而非本国货币计价的债券,并在伦敦或罗斯柴尔德家族设有分支机构的其他市场支付利息。1818年,他们首次公开发行普鲁士5%债券,树立了新的标准。经过漫长而充满争议的谈判*,这些债券不仅在伦敦发行,还在法兰克福、柏林等地发行。汉堡和阿姆斯特丹。 30德国法律专家约翰·海因里希·本德在其著作《论国家债券交易》(1825年)中,将此列为罗斯柴尔德家族最重要的金融创新之一:“任何政府债券持有人……都可以毫不费力地在多个不同的地方随时收取利息。” 31当然,债券发行绝非罗斯柴尔德家族的唯一业务:他们同时也是债券交易员、货币套利者、贵金属交易商和私人银行家,以及保险、矿业和铁路领域的投资者。然而,债券市场仍然是他们的核心竞争力。与规模较小的竞争对手不同,罗斯柴尔德家族以只交易如今所谓的投资级证券而自豪。尽管在19世纪20年代中期爆发了拉丁美洲债务危机(这是众多危机中的第一次),但他们在19世纪20年代发行的债券到1829年都没有违约。

The more prosaic reality was that the Rothschilds were able to build on their successes during the final phase of the Napoleonic Wars to establish themselves as the dominant players in an increasingly international London bond market. They did this by establishing a capital base and an information network that were soon far superior to those of their nearest rivals, the Barings. Between 1815 and 1859, it has been estimated that the London house issued fourteen different sovereign bonds with a face value of nearly £43 million, more than half the total issued by all banks in London.27 Although British government bonds were the principal security they marketed to investors, they also sold French, Prussian, Russian, Austrian, Neapolitan and Brazilian bonds.28 In addition, they all but monopolized bond issuance by the Belgian government after 1830. Typically, the Rothschilds would buy a tranche of new bonds outright from a government, charging a commission for distributing these to their network of brokers and investors throughout Europe, and remitting funds to the government only when all the instalments had been received from buyers. There would usually be a generous spread between the price the Rothschilds paid the sovereign borrower and the price they asked of investors (with room for an additional price ‘run up’ after the initial public offering). Of course, as we have seen, there had been large-scale international lending before, notably in Genoa, Antwerp and Amsterdam.29 But a distinguishing feature of the London bond market after 1815 was the Rothschilds’ insistence that most new borrowers issue bonds denominated in sterling, rather than their own currency, and make interest payments in London or one of the other markets where the Rothschilds had branches. A new standard was set by their 1818 initial public offering of Prussian 5 per cent bonds, which – after protracted and often fraught negotiations* – were issued not only in London, but also in Frankfurt, Berlin, Hamburg and Amsterdam.30 In his book On the Traffic in State Bonds (1825), the German legal expert Johann Heinrich Bender singled out this as one of the Rothschilds’ most important financial innovations: ‘Any owner of government bonds . . . can collect the interest at his convenience in several different places without any effort.’31 Bond issuance was by no means the only business the Rothschilds did, to be sure: they were also bond traders, currency arbitrageurs, bullion dealers and private bankers, as well as investors in insurance, mines and railways. Yet the bond market remained their core competence. Unlike their lesser competitors, the Rothschilds took pride in dealing only in what would now be called investment grade securities. No bond they issued in the 1820s was in default by 1829, despite a Latin American debt crisis in the middle of the decade (the first of many).

随着成功,财富也与日俱增。1836年内森去世时,他的个人财富相当于英国国民收入的0.62%。1818年至1852年间,罗斯柴尔德家族五大“家族”(法兰克福、伦敦、那不勒斯、巴黎和维也纳)的总资本从180万英镑增长到950万英镑。早在1825年,它们的资本总额就已是巴林兄弟银行和法国银行总和的九倍。到1899年,其资本总额达到4100万英镑,超过了德国五大股份制银行资本的总和。罗斯柴尔德家族逐渐发展成为管理家族财富的跨国资产管理公司。随着家族成员代代相传,为了维系家族的团结,五大家族之间定期修订的契约以及堂表亲或叔侄之间的高比例联姻得以维持。在1824年至1877年间,内森的父亲梅耶·阿姆谢尔·罗斯柴尔德的后裔共缔结了21桩婚姻,其中至少有15桩是他的直系后裔之间的联姻。此外,在其他一些犹太家族逐渐背离犹太教或与异族通婚的时期,罗斯柴尔德家族对犹太信仰的集体忠诚,强化了他们作为“高加索(犹太)皇室家族”的共同身份认同感和使命感。

With success came ever greater wealth. When Nathan died in 1836, his personal fortune was equivalent to 0.62 percent of British national income. Between 1818 and 1852, the combined capital of the five Rothschild ‘houses’ (Frankfurt, London, Naples, Paris and Vienna) rose from £1.8 million to £9.5 million. As early as 1825 their combined capital was nine times greater than that of Baring Brothers and the Banque de France. By 1899, at £41 million, it exceeded the capital of the five biggest German joint-stock banks put together. Increasingly the firm became a multinational asset manager for the wealth of the managers’ extended family. As their numbers grew from generation to generation, familial unity was maintained by a combination of periodically revised contracts between the five houses and a high level of intermarriage between cousins or between uncles and nieces. Of twenty-one marriages involving descendants of Nathan’s father Mayer Amschel Rothschild that were solemnized between 1824 and 1877, no fewer than fifteen were between his direct descendants. In addition, the family’s collective fidelity to the Jewish faith, at a time when some other Jewish families were slipping into apostasy or mixed marriage, strengthened their sense of common identity and purpose as ‘the Caucasian [Jewish] royal family’.

老梅耶·阿姆谢尔曾多次告诫他的五个儿子:“如果不能赢得爱戴,那就让人畏惧。”当罗斯柴尔德家族作为债券市场的主宰者,在十九世纪中期的金融界叱咤风云时,他们早已被人畏惧多于被人爱戴。右翼反动派哀叹一种新型财富的崛起,这种财富比欧洲贵族精英的土地收益更高、流动性更强。正如海因里希·海涅所洞察到的,罗斯柴尔德家族正在创建的金融体系具有深刻的革命性意义:

Old Mayer Amschel had repeatedly admonished his five sons: ‘If you can’t make yourself loved, make yourself feared.’ As they bestrode the mid-nineteenth-century financial world as masters of the bond market, the Rothschilds were already more feared than loved. Reactionaries on the Right lamented the rise of a new form of wealth, higher-yielding and more liquid than the landed estates of Europe’s aristocratic elites. As Heinrich Heine discerned, there was something profoundly revolutionary about the financial system the Rothschilds were creating:

纸质证券体系使人们可以自由选择居住地;他们可以不工作,依靠债券利息和可携带的财产在任何地方生活,于是他们聚集在一起,构成了我们首都城市的真正权力。我们早就知道,当各种不同的力量能够并存,当知识和社会权力如此集中时,预示着什么。

The system of paper securities frees . . . men to choose whatever place of residence they like; they can live anywhere, without working, from the interest on their bonds, their portable property, and so they gather together and constitute the true power of our capital cities. And we have long known what it portends when the most diverse energies can live side by side, when there is such centralization of the intellectual and of social authority.

在海涅看来,罗斯柴尔德如今可以与黎塞留和罗伯斯庇尔相提并论,成为“三个恐怖分子的名字,预示着旧贵族的逐步覆灭”。黎塞留摧毁了旧贵族的权力;罗伯斯庇尔斩首了其腐朽的残余势力;如今,罗斯柴尔德正在为欧洲打造一个新的社会精英。

In Heine’s eyes, Rothschild could now be mentioned in the same breath as Richelieu and Robespierre as one of the ‘three terroristic names that spell the gradual annihilation of the old aristocracy’. Richelieu had destroyed its power; Robespierre had decapitated its decadent remnant; now Rothschild was providing Europe with a new social elite by

他将政府债券体系提升至至高无上的权力……[并]赋予货币昔日土地的特权。诚然,他由此创造了一个新的贵族阶层,但这却是建立在最不可靠的要素——货币之上的……[货币]比水更流动,比空气更不稳定…… 32

raising up the system of government bonds to supreme power . . . [and] endowing money with the former privileges of land. To be sure, he has thereby created a new aristocracy, but this is based on the most unreliable of elements, on money . . . [which] is more fluid than water and less steady than the air . . .32

与此同时,左翼激进分子哀叹政治领域一股新势力的崛起,这股势力对政府财政拥有否决权,进而对大多数政策拥有否决权。继罗斯柴尔德家族为奥地利、普鲁士等国发行债券取得成功之后,在俄罗斯,内森被讽刺为“空心同盟”的保险经纪人,帮助保护欧洲免受自由主义政治风暴的侵袭。 33 1821年,他甚至因为“与外国势力勾结,特别是援助奥地利,以应对奥地利政府针对欧洲自由的阴谋”而收到死亡威胁。 34自由主义历史学家儒勒·米什莱在1842年的日记中写道:“罗斯柴尔德先生对欧洲的王子和宫廷大臣都了如指掌。他把所有朝臣和国王的账目都记在脑子里;他甚至不用查阅账簿就能与他们交谈。他对其中一位说:‘如果你任命这样的大臣,你的账目就会变成赤字。’” 35 不出所料,罗斯柴尔德家族的犹太人身份进一步加剧了根深蒂固的反犹偏见。罗斯柴尔德家族在19世纪30年代刚出现在美国政坛不久,密西西比州州长就谴责“罗斯柴尔德男爵”的血管里流淌着“犹大和夏洛克的血脉,……兼具这两个同胞的特质”。到了19世纪后期,民粹主义作家“科因”·哈维将罗斯柴尔德银行描绘成一只巨大的黑色章鱼,触手遍布全球。36

Meanwhile, Radicals on the Left bemoaned the rise of a new power in the realm of politics, which wielded a veto power over government finance and hence over most policy. Following the success of Rothschild bond issues for Austria, Prussia and Russia, Nathan was caricatured as the insurance broker to the ‘Hollow Alliance’, helping to protect Europe against liberal political fires.33 In 1821 he even received a death threat because of ‘his connexion with foreign powers, and particularly the assistance rendered to Austria, on account of the designs of that government against the liberties of Europe’.34 The liberal historian Jules Michelet noted in his journal in 1842: ‘M. Rothschild knows Europe prince by prince, and the bourse courtier by courtier. He has all their accounts in his head, that of the courtiers and that of the kings; he talks to them without even consulting his books. To one such he says: “Your account will go into the red if you appoint such a minister.”’35 Predictably, the fact that the Rothschilds were Jewish gave a new impetus to deep-rooted anti-Semitic prejudices. No sooner had the Rothschilds appeared on the American scene in the 1830s than the governor of Mississippi was denouncing ‘Baron Rothschild’ for having ‘the blood of Judas and Shylock flow[ing] in his veins, and . . . unit[ing] the qualities of both his countrymen.’ Later in the century, the Populist writer ‘Coin’ Harvey would depict the Rothschild bank as a vast, black octopus stretching its tentacles around the world.36

然而,罗斯柴尔德家族似乎能够随心所欲地允许或禁止战争,这似乎最令人愤慨。早在1828年,普克勒-穆斯考亲王就提到“罗斯柴尔德……如今欧洲似乎没有任何势力能够发动战争”。 37一位20世纪初的评论家*尖锐地提出了这样一个问题:

Yet it was the Rothschilds’ seeming ability to permit or prohibit wars at will that seemed to arouse the most indignation. As early as 1828, Prince Pückler-Muskau referred to ‘Rothschild . . . without whom no power in Europe today seems able to make war’.37 One early-twentieth-century commentator* pointedly posed the question:

难道有人真的认为,如果罗斯柴尔德家族及其关联势力反对,任何欧洲国家还能发动一场大战,或者能够举出巨额国家贷款吗?38

Does anyone seriously suppose that a great war could be undertaken by any European State, or any great State loan subscribed, if the house of Rothschild and its connexions set their face against it?38

的确,人们或许会认为罗斯柴尔德家族需要战争。毕竟,正是战争促成了内森·罗斯柴尔德最大的一笔交易。如果没有战争,19世纪的各国几乎无需发行债券。然而,正如我们所见,战争往往会冲击现有债券的价格,因为战争增加了债务国(如同16世纪的威尼斯)在战败和领土丧失的情况下无力支付利息的风险。到了19世纪中叶,罗斯柴尔德家族已从交易员转型为基金经理,精心管理着他们庞大的政府债券投资组合。如今,他们已经积累了财富,但战争带来的损失可能远大于收益。正因如此,他们始终反对意大利和德国的民族统一运动。也正因如此,他们对美国陷入内战感到不安。罗斯柴尔德家族通过向英国提供资金支持,左右了拿破仑战争的最终结果。现在,他们却通过选择置身事外,帮助决定了美国内战的结局。

It might, indeed, be assumed that the Rothschilds needed war. It was war, after all, that had generated Nathan Rothschild’s biggest deal. Without wars, nineteenth-century states would have had little need to issue bonds. As we have seen, however, wars tended to hit the price of existing bonds by increasing the risk that (like sixteenth-century Venice) a debtor state would fail to meet its interest payments in the event of defeat and losses of territory. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Rothschilds had evolved from traders into fund managers, carefully tending to their own vast portfolio of government bonds. Now, having made their money, they stood to lose more than they gained from conflict. It was for this reason that they were consistently hostile to strivings for national unity in both Italy and Germany. And it was for this reason that they viewed with unease the descent of the United States into internecine warfare. The Rothschilds had decided the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars by putting their financial weight behind Britain. Now they would help decide the outcome of the American Civil War – by choosing to sit on the sidelines.

驱赶迪克西

Driving Dixie Down

1863年5月,美国内战爆发两年后,尤利西斯·S·格兰特少将攻占了密西西比州首府杰克逊,迫使约翰·C·彭伯顿中将指挥的南方邦联军队向西撤退至密西西比河畔的维克斯堡。被联邦军队包围的杰克逊城,最终被联邦军队包围。炮艇从后方猛烈炮击彭伯顿的军队,彭伯顿的军队击退了联邦军的两次进攻,但最终在漫长的围困中被围困致死。7月4日,独立日当天,彭伯顿投降。从此,密西西比河牢牢掌握在北方手中。南方从此一分为二。

In May 1863, two years into the American Civil War, Major-General Ulysses S. Grant captured Jackson, the Mississippi state capital, and forced the Confederate army under Lieutenant-General John C. Pemberton to retreat westward to Vicksburg on the banks of the Mississippi River. Surrounded, with Union gunboats bombarding their positions from behind, Pemberton’s army repulsed two Union assaults but they were finally starved into submission by a grinding siege. On 4 July, Independence Day, Pemberton surrendered. From now on, the Mississippi was firmly in the hands of the North. The South was literally split in two.

维克斯堡的陷落一直被视为战争中的重大转折点之一。然而,从经济角度来看,它并非真正的决定性事件。关键事件发生在一年多以前,在维克斯堡下游两百英里处,密西西比河汇入墨西哥湾的地方。1862年4月29日,海军少将大卫·法拉格特率军攻占了杰克逊堡和圣菲利普堡,夺取了新奥尔良的控制权。这场战斗远没有维克斯堡围城战那样血腥和漫长,但对南方邦联而言,其损失同样惨重。

The fall of Vicksburg is always seen as one of the great turning points in the war. And yet, from a financial point of view, it was really not the decisive one. The key event had happened more than a year before, two hundred miles downstream from Vicksburg, where the Mississippi joins the Gulf of Mexico. On 29 April 1862 Flag Officer David Farragut had run the guns of Fort Jackson and Fort St Philip to seize control of New Orleans. This was a far less bloody and protracted clash than the siege of Vicksburg, but equally disastrous for the Southern cause.

南方邦联的财政状况是美国历史上最令人扼腕的“如果当初……”之一。 39 归根结底,南方各州在军事上取得的辉煌战绩,与其说是缺乏工业能力或人力,不如说是缺乏现金。战争初期,由于缺乏中央税收体系,羽翼未丰的南方邦联财政部只能通过向本国公民出售债券来支付军队开支,其中两笔巨额贷款分别为1500万美元和1亿美元。然而,南方拥有众多自给自足的农场和相对较小的城镇,其流动资金数量有限。后来有传言称,为了生存,南方邦联转而求助于罗斯柴尔德家族,希望这个世界上最伟大的金融王朝能够像当年帮助惠灵顿在滑铁卢击败拿破仑那样,帮助他们战胜北方。

The finances of the Confederacy are one of the great might-have-beens of American history.39 For, in the final analysis, it was as much a lack of hard cash as a lack of industrial capacity or manpower that undercut what was, in military terms, an impressive effort by the Southern states. At the beginning of the war, in the absence of a pre-existing system of central taxation, the fledgling Confederate Treasury had paid for its army by selling bonds to its own citizens, in the form of two large loans for $15 million and $100 million. But there was a finite amount of liquid capital available in the South, with its many self-contained farms and relatively small towns. To survive, it was later alleged, the Confederacy turned to the Rothschilds, in the hope that the world’s greatest financial dynasty might help them beat the North as they had helped Wellington beat Napoleon at Waterloo.

这个提议并非完全异想天开。在纽约,罗斯柴尔德家族的代理人奥古斯特·贝尔蒙特眼睁睁地看着美国滑入内战的深渊,心中充满了恐惧。作为民主党全国主席,他曾是斯蒂芬·A·道格拉斯的坚定支持者,道格拉斯是亚伯拉罕·林肯在1860年总统大选中的对手。贝尔蒙特始终对他所处的困境持批评态度。有人称林肯的政策是“致命的没收财产和强制解放”。 40詹姆斯的第三个儿子所罗门·德·罗斯柴尔德在战前写给家人的信中也表达了亲南方的立场。41一些北方评论员由此得出显而易见的结论:罗斯柴尔德家族支持南方。《芝加哥论坛报》在1864年怒斥道:“贝尔蒙特、罗斯柴尔德家族以及所有犹太人……一直在大量购买南方邦联的债券。”一位林肯的支持者指责“犹太人、杰斐逊·戴维斯(南方邦联总统)和魔鬼”是针对联邦的邪恶三位一体。 42 1863年贝尔蒙特访问伦敦时,他曾告诉莱昂内尔·德·罗斯柴尔德,“北方很快就会被征服”。 (这只会加剧人们的怀疑,即负责争取英国支持南方事业的邦联国务卿犹大·本杰明本人就是一名犹太人。)

The suggestion was not altogether fanciful. In New York, the Rothschild agent August Belmont had watched with horror as the United States slid into Civil War. As the Democratic Party’s national chairman, he had been a leading supporter of Stephen A. Douglas, Abraham Lincoln’s opponent in the presidential election of 1860. Belmont remained a vocal critic of what he called Lincoln’s ‘fatal policy of confiscation and forcible emancipation’.40 Salomon de Rothschild, James’s third son, had also expressed pro-Southern sympathies in his letters home before the war began.41 Some Northern commentators drew the obvious inference: the Rothschilds were backing the South. ‘Belmont, the Rothschilds, and the whole tribe of Jews . . . have been buying up Confederate bonds,’ thundered the Chicago Tribune in 1864. One Lincoln supporter accused the ‘Jews, Jeff Davis [the Confederate president] and the devil’ of being an unholy trinity directed against the Union.42 When he visited London in 1863, Belmont himself told Lionel de Rothschild that ‘soon the North would be conquered’. (It merely stoked the fires of suspicion that the man charged with recruiting Britain to the South’s cause, the Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin, was himself a Jew.)

然而,罗斯柴尔德家族实际上并没有选择支持南方。为什么呢?或许是因为他们对奴隶制本身深恶痛绝。但至少同样重要的是,他们认为南方邦联的信用风险很高(毕竟,南方邦联总统杰斐逊·戴维斯在担任美国参议员时曾公开主张拒绝偿还各州债务)。这种不信任似乎在欧洲也普遍存在。当南方邦联试图在欧洲市场发行传统债券时,投资者反应冷淡。但南方人却另有妙计。这个妙计(就像他们的袖子一样)与棉花息息相关——棉花是南方邦联经济的命脉,也是南方最大的出口商品。他们的想法是,不仅将南方的棉花作物作为出口收入的来源,还要将其作为一种新型棉花债券的抵押品。当名不见经传的法国公司埃米尔·埃朗格公司(Emile Erlanger and Co.)开始代表南方邦联发行棉花债券时,伦敦和阿姆斯特丹的反应更为积极。这些英镑债券票面利率为7%,期限为20年,其最吸引人的地方在于,它们可以按战前每磅6便士的价格兑换成棉花。尽管南方邦联在军事上遭遇挫折,但这些债券仍然保值。战争的大部分时间里,债券价格居高不下,原因很简单:作为债券标的的棉花价格因战时需求增加而上涨。事实上,尽管南方邦联在葛底斯堡和维克斯堡战役中战败,但由于棉花价格飙升,债券价格在1863年12月至1864年9月间翻了一番。 43 此外,南方邦联还处于有利地位,可以通过限制棉花供应来进一步抬高棉花价格。

In reality, however, the Rothschilds opted not to back the South. Why? Perhaps it was because they felt a genuine distaste for the institution of slavery. But of at least equal importance was a sense that the Confederacy was not a good credit risk (after all, the Confederate president Jefferson Davis had openly advocated the repudiation of state debts when he was a US senator). That mistrust seemed to be widely shared in Europe. When the Confederacy tried to sell conventional bonds in European markets, investors showed little enthusiasm. But the Southerners had an ingenious trick up their sleeves. The trick (like the sleeves themselves) was made of cotton, the key to the Confederate economy and by far the South’s largest export. The idea was to use the South’s cotton crop not just as a source of export earnings, but as collateral for a new kind of cotton-backed bond. When the obscure French firm of Emile Erlanger and Co. started issuing cotton-backed bonds on the South’s behalf, the response in London and Amsterdam was more positive. The most appealing thing about these sterling bonds, which had a 7 per cent coupon and a maturity of twenty years, was that they could be converted into cotton at the pre-war price of six pence a pound. Despite the South’s military setbacks, they retained their value for most of the war for the simple reason that the price of the underlying security, cotton, was rising as a consequence of increased wartime demand. Indeed, the price of the bonds actually doubled between December 1863 and September 1864, despite the Confederate defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, because the price of cotton was soaring.43 Moreover, the South was in the happy position of being able to raise that price still further – by restricting the cotton supply.

1860年,利物浦港是英国纺织业进口棉花的主要通道,而纺织业正是当时维多利亚时代工业经济的支柱产业。这些进口棉花超过80%来自美国南部。南方邦联领导人认为,这让他们有足够的筹码迫使英国加入战争。为了加大施压力度,他们决定对所有运往利物浦的棉花出口实施禁运。禁运的后果是毁灭性的。棉花价格从每磅6.25便士飙升至27.25便士。来自南方的棉花进口量从1860年的26​​0万包暴跌至1862年的不足7.2万包。像曼彻斯特南部斯泰尔(Styal)保存至今的那家典型的英国棉纺厂,雇佣了大约400名工人,但这仅仅是兰开夏郡棉花产业30万从业人员中的一小部分。没有棉花,这些工人就真的无事可做了。到1862年末,一半的劳动力被解雇;兰开夏郡约四分之一的人口依靠救济金度日。44人们称之为棉花饥荒。然而,这是一场人为的饥荒。而制造这场饥荒的人似乎达到了他们的目的。禁运不仅导致英格兰北部出现失业、饥饿和骚乱;棉花短缺还推高了南方棉花债券的价格,从而提升了其价值,使其成为英国政治精英们不可抗拒的投资。未来的首相威廉·尤尔特·格莱斯顿购买了一些,《泰晤士报》的编辑约翰·德莱恩也购买了一些。45

In 1860 the port of Liverpool was the main artery for the supply of imported cotton to the British textile industry, then the mainstay of the Victorian industrial economy. More than 80 per cent of these imports came from the southern United States. The Confederate leaders believed this gave them the leverage to bring Britain into the war on their side. To ratchet up the pressure, they decided to impose an embargo on all cotton exports to Liverpool. The effects were devastating. Cotton prices soared from 6¼d per pound to 27¼d. Imports from the South slumped from 2.6 million bales in 1860 to less than 72,000 in 1862. A typical English cotton mill like the one that has been preserved at Styal, south of Manchester, employed around 400 workers, but that was just a fraction of the 300,000 people employed by King Cotton across Lancashire as a whole. Without cotton there was literally nothing for those workers to do. By late 1862 half the workforce had been laid off; around a quarter of the entire population of Lancashire was on poor relief.44 They called it the cotton famine. This, however, was a man-made famine. And the men who made it seemed to be achieving their goal. Not only did the embargo cause unemployment, hunger and riots in the north of England; the shortage of cotton also drove up the price and hence the value of the South’s cotton-backed bonds, making them an irresistibly attractive investment for key members of the British political elite. The future Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone, bought some, as did the editor of The Times, John Delane.45

南方邦联棉花债券,带有票息,但只剪掉了前四张票息。

Confederate cotton bond with coupons, only the first four of which have been clipped

然而,南方操纵债券市场的能力取决于一个至关重要的条件:投资者应该……如果南方未能支付利息,北方有权实际占有作为债券抵押品的棉花。毕竟,抵押品只有在债权人能够获得的情况下才有效。正因如此,1862年4月新奥尔良的陷落才成为美国内战的真正转折点。随着南方主要港口落入北方联邦手中,任何想要获得南方棉花的投资者都必须两次突破北方联邦的海上封锁。鉴于北方在密西西比河及其周边地区日益增长的海军力量,这显然不是一个诱人的前景。

Yet the South’s ability to manipulate the bond market depended on one overriding condition: that investors should be able to take physical possession of the cotton which underpinned the bonds if the South failed to make its interest payments. Collateral is, after all, only good if a creditor can get his hands on it. And that is why the fall of New Orleans in April 1862 was the real turning point in the American Civil War. With the South’s main port in Union hands, any investor who wanted to get hold of Southern cotton had to run the Union’s naval blockade not once but twice, in and out. Given the North’s growing naval power in and around the Mississippi, that was not an enticing prospect.

如果南方各州能够守住新奥尔良,直到棉花收成运往欧洲,他们或许就能在伦敦售出超过300万英镑的棉花债券。甚至连一向规避风险的罗斯柴尔德家族也可能改变主意。然而,他们却对埃兰格贷款不屑一顾,认为其“投机性质太强,极有可能吸引所有疯狂的投机者……我们没有听说任何体面的投资者参与其中。”凡是与此事有关的人。” 46南方邦联玩火自焚。他们切断了棉花供应的渠道,却失去了重新开启的能力。到1863年,兰开夏郡的纺织厂在中国、埃及和印度找到了新的棉花来源。如今,投资者对南方以棉花为担保的债券迅速失去信心。这对南方邦联的经济造成了灾难性的后果。

If the South had managed to hold on to New Orleans until the cotton harvest had been offloaded to Europe, they might have managed to sell more than £3 million of cotton bonds in London. Maybe even the risk-averse Rothschilds might have come off the financial fence. As it was, they dismissed the Erlanger loan as being ‘of so speculative a nature that it was very likely to attract all wild speculators . . . we do not hear of any respectable people having anything to do with it’.46 The Confederacy had overplayed its hand. They had turned off the cotton tap, but then lost the ability to turn it back on. By 1863 the mills of Lancashire had found new sources of cotton in China, Egypt and India. And now investors were rapidly losing faith in the South’s cotton-backed bonds. The consequences for the Confederate economy were disastrous.

由于国内债券市场枯竭,外债仅有两笔微不足道的贷款,南方邦联政府被迫印制无担保的纸币来支付战争和其他开支,总计高达数十亿美元。诚然,内战双方都不得不印钞。但到战争结束时,联邦的“绿背”纸币仍值约50美分黄金,而南方邦联的“灰背”纸币尽管在1864年进行了一次徒劳的货币改革尝试,也仅值1美分。 47南方各州和地方政府可以自行印制纸币,再加上伪造猖獗(因为南方邦联的纸币制作粗糙,易于复制),使得情况雪上加霜。随着越来越多的纸币追逐越来越少的商品,通货膨胀急剧上升。内战期间,南方物价上涨了约4000%。 48 相比之下,北方物价仅上涨了60%。早在 1865 年 4 月南方邦联主力部队投降之前,南方经济就已经开始崩溃,恶性通货膨胀是战败的必然预兆。

With its domestic bond market exhausted and only two paltry foreign loans, the Confederate government was forced to print unbacked paper dollars to pay for the war and its other expenses, billion dollars’ worth in all. Both sides in the Civil War had to print money, it is true. But by the end of the war the Union’s ‘greenback’ dollars were still worth about 50 cents in gold, whereas the Confederacy’s ‘greybacks’ were worth just one cent, despite a vain attempt at currency reform in 1864.47 The situation was worsened by the ability of Southern states and municipalities to print paper money of their own; and by rampant forgery, since Confederate notes were crudely made and easy to copy. With ever more paper money chasing ever fewer goods, inflation exploded. Prices in the South rose by around 4,000 per cent during the Civil War.48 By contrast, prices in the North rose by just 60 per cent. Even before the surrender of the principal Confederate armies in April 1865, the economy of the South was collapsing, with hyperinflation as the sure harbinger of defeat.

罗斯柴尔德家族的判断是正确的。那些投资南方邦联债券的人最终血本无归,因为战胜的北方承诺不会偿还南方的债务。最终,除了印钞来资助南方的战争之外,别无选择。历史上,试图逆债券市场而导致灾难性通货膨胀和军事耻辱的案例并非个例。

The Rothschilds had been right. Those who had invested in Confederate bonds ended up losing everything, since the victorious North pledged not to honour the debts of the South. In the end, there had been no option but to finance the Southern war effort by printing money. It would not be the last time in history that an attempt to buck the bond market would end in ruinous inflation and military humiliation.

一张印有南方邦联“灰背”图案的路易斯安那州五美元纸币

A Confederate ‘greyback’ State of Louisiana five-dollar bill

对食利者的安乐死

The Euthanasia of the Rentier

在十九世纪,那些因邦联债券而血本无归的人的遭遇并非个例。邦联远非美洲唯一一个最终令债券持有人失望的国家;它只不过是北边最北端的违约者。在格兰德河以南,债务违约和货币贬值几乎司空见惯。十九世纪拉丁美洲的经验在许多方面预示了二十世纪中期几乎普遍存在的问题。部分原因是,最有可能投资债券——因而也最关心以稳健货币及时获得利息——的社会阶层在拉丁美洲比其他地方更为弱势。部分原因是,拉丁美洲各国共和国是最早发现,当相当一部分债券持有人是外国人时,违约相对来说并不痛苦的国家之一。第一次拉丁美洲重大债务危机早在1826年至1829年就已爆发,这绝非偶然。当时,秘鲁、哥伦比亚、智利、墨西哥、危地马拉和阿根廷都拖欠了几年前在伦敦发放的贷款。49

The fate of those who lost their shirts on Confederate bonds was not especially unusual in the nineteenth century. The Confederacy was far from the only state in the Americas to end up disappointing its bondholders; it was merely the northernmost delinquent. South of the Rio Grande, debt defaults and currency depreciations verged on the commonplace. The experience of Latin America in the nineteenth century in many ways foreshadowed problems that would become almost universal in the middle of the twentieth century. Partly this was because the social class that was most likely to invest in bonds – and therefore to have an interest in prompt interest payment in a sound currency – was weaker there than elsewhere. Partly it was because Latin American republics were among the first to discover that it was relatively painless to default when a substantial proportion of bondholders were foreign. It was no mere accident that the first great Latin American debt crisis happened as early as 1826–9, when Peru, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Guatemala and Argentina all defaulted on loans issued in London just a few years before.49

在许多方面,债券市场的确拥有强大的力量。到了19世纪后期,拖欠债务的国家面临着经济制裁、外国对其财政的控制,甚至在至少五个案例中还面临军事干预的风险。50很难相信格莱斯顿会下令……如果不是埃及政府威胁要违背其对欧洲债券持有人(包括他本人)的义务,1882年入侵埃及的战争或许就不会发生。将“新兴市场”置于大英帝国的庇护之下,是消除投资者政治风险的最可靠途径。 51即使是帝国之外的国家,如果违约,也面临着炮舰造访的风险,委内瑞拉在1902年就遭遇了这样的命运:英国、德国和意大利的联合海军远征军一度封锁了该国的港口。美国在保护中美洲和加勒比地区债券持有人的利益方面尤其积极(且卓有成效)。 52

In many ways, it was true that the bond market was powerful. By the later nineteenth century, countries that defaulted on their debts risked economic sanctions, the imposition of foreign control over their finances and even, in at least five cases, military intervention.50 It is hard to believe that Gladstone would have ordered the invasion of Egypt in 1882 if the Egyptian government had not threatened to renege on its obligations to European bondholders, himself among them. Bringing an ‘emerging market’ under the aegis of the British Empire was the surest way to remove political risk from investors’ concerns.51 Even those outside the Empire risked a visit from a gunboat if they defaulted, as Venezuela discovered in 1902, when a joint naval expedition by Britain, Germany and Italy temporarily blockaded the country’s ports. The United States was especially energetic (and effective) in protecting bondholders’ interests in Central America and the Caribbean.52

但债券市场在一个关键方面存在潜在脆弱性。19世纪,伦敦金融城是世界上最大的国际金融市场,其投资者虽然富有,但人数并不多。19世纪初,英国债券持有人可能不足25万人,仅占总人口的2%。然而,他们的财富却是英国国民总收入的两倍多;他们的收入约占国民收入的7%。1822年,这部分收入——即国债利息——约占公共支出总额的一半,但超过三分之二的税收收入是间接税,因此用于消费。即使到了1870年,这两个比例仍然分别占三分之一和一半以上。很难想象还有比这更倒退的财政制度:对大多数人生活必需品征收的税款,却被用来支付极少数人的利息。难怪像威廉·科贝特这样的激进分子会对此感到愤怒。科贝特在其著作《乡村游记》(1830年)中宣称:“国债及其相关的一切税收和赌博,都具有将财富集中到大众手中的天然倾向……最终使少数人获利。” 53 他警告说,如果不进行政治改革,整个国家最终将落入“那些借钱来维持这个庞然大物般的制度的人手中……放贷者、股票投机者……犹太人和所有贪污纳税的人”。 54

But in one crucial respect the bond market was potentially vulnerable. Investors in the City of London, the biggest international financial market in the world throughout the nineteenth century, were wealthy but not numerous. In the early nineteenth century the number of British bondholders may have been fewer than 250,000, barely 2 per cent of the population. Yet their wealth was more than double the entire national income of the United Kingdom; their income in the region of 7 per cent of national income. In 1822 this income – the interest on the national debt – amounted to roughly half of total public spending, yet more than two thirds of tax revenue was indirect and hence fell on consumption. Even as late as 1870 these proportions were still, respectively, a third and more than half. It would be quite hard to devise a more regressive fiscal system, with taxes imposed on the necessities of the many being used to finance interest payments to the very few. Small wonder Radicals like William Cobbett were incensed. ‘A national debt, and all the taxation and gambling belonging to it,’ Cobbett declared in his Rural Rides (1830), ‘have a natural tendency to draw wealth into great masses . . . for the gain of a few.’53 In the absence of political reform, he warned, the entire country would end up in the hands of ‘those who have had borrowed from them the money to uphold this monster of a system . . . the loan-jobbers, stock-jobbers . . . Jews and the whole tribe of tax-eaters’.54

此类抨击并未削弱法国所谓的“食利者”(即政府利息的受益者)阶层的地位。债券,例如法国的地租(rente)。相反,1830年后的几十年是欧洲食利者的黄金时代。违约越来越少见。由于金本位制,货币变得越来越可靠。55尽管选举权普遍扩大,但食利者的胜利仍然令人瞩目。诚然,储蓄银行的兴起(通常被要求持有政府债券作为其主要资产)使社会的新阶层间接接触到债券市场,从而在债券市场中占有一席之地。但从根本上讲,食利者仍然是罗斯柴尔德、巴林和格莱斯顿等精英——他们在社会、政治,尤其是经济上紧密相连。终结他们统治地位的并非民主或社会主义的兴起,而是一场财政和货币灾难,而这场灾难正是欧洲精英自身应承担的责任。这场灾难就是第一次世界大战。

Such tirades did little to weaken the position of the class known in France as the rentiers – the recipients of interest on government bonds like the French rente. On the contrary, the decades after 1830 were a golden age for the rentier in Europe. Defaults became less and less frequent. Money, thanks to the gold standard, became more and more dependable.55 This triumph of the rentier, despite the generalized widening of electoral franchises, was remarkable. True, the rise of savings banks (which were often mandated to hold government bonds as their principal assets) gave new segments of society indirect exposure to, and therefore stakes in, the bond market. But fundamentally the rentiers remained an elite of Rothschilds, Barings and Gladstones – socially, politically, but above all economically intertwined. What ended their dominance was not the rise of democracy or socialism, but a fiscal and monetary catastrophe for which the European elites were themselves responsible. That catastrophe was the First World War.


米尔顿·弗里德曼在其著名的定义中写道:“通货膨胀始终且无处不在,因为它的发生离不开货币数量的增长速度超过产出增长速度。”第一次世界大战期间及战后所有参战国的情况都很好地说明了这一点。高通胀的出现基本上经历了五个阶段:

‘Inflation’, wrote Milton Friedman in a famous definition, ‘is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it cannot occur without a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.’ What happened in all the combatant states during and after the First World War illustrates this pretty well. There were essentially five steps to high inflation:

  1. 战争不仅导致物资短缺,而且……

  2. War led not only to shortages of goods but also to

  3. 政府向中央银行的短期借款,

  4. short-term government borrowing from the central bank,

  5. 这实际上将债务转化为现金,从而扩大了货币供应量。

  6. which effectively turned debt into cash, thereby expanding the money supply,

  7. 导致公众对通胀的预期发生变化,以及对现金余额的需求下降。

  8. causing public expectations of inflation to shift and the demand for cash balances to fall

  9. 商品价格将会上涨

  10. and prices of goods to rise.*

然而,纯粹的货币理论无法解释为何一个国家的通货膨胀进程会比另一个国家进展得更快或更严重。它也无法解释为何通货膨胀的后果因国而异。如果将1914年至1918年间主要参战国的公共支出总额加总,英国的支出略高于德国,法国的支出则远高于俄国。以美元计价,英国、法国和美国的公共债务在1914年4月至1918年3月期间的增长幅度远高于德国。 56 诚然,1913年至1918年间,德国流通中的纸币数量增幅(1040%)高于英国(708%)或法国(386%),但保加利亚的增幅为1116%,罗马尼亚为961%。 57 与1913年相比,到1918年,意大利、法国和英国的批发价格涨幅均高于德国。 1918年柏林的生活成本指数是战前水平的2.3倍;伦敦的情况也相差无几(高出2.1倍)。58那么,为什么第一次世界大战后陷入恶性通货膨胀的是德国?为什么马克会贬值到一文不值?关键在于债券市场在战争和战后金融中所扮演的角色。

Pure monetary theory, however, cannot explain why in one country the inflationary process proceeds so much further or faster than in another. Nor can it explain why the consequences of inflation vary so much from case to case. If one adds together the total public expenditures of the major combatant powers between 1914 and 1918, Britain spent rather more than Germany and France much more than Russia. Expressed in terms of dollars, the public debts of Britain, France and the United States increased much more between April 1914 and March 1918 than that of Germany.56 True, the volume of banknotes in circulation rose by more in Germany between 1913 and 1918 (1,040 per cent) than in Britain (708 per cent) or France (386 per cent), but for Bulgaria the figure was 1,116 per cent and for Romania 961 per cent.57 Relative to 1913, wholesale prices had risen further by 1918 in Italy, France and Britain than in Germany. The cost-of-living index for Berlin in 1918 was 2.3 times higher than its pre-war level; for London it was little different (2.1 times higher).58 Why, then, was it Germany that plunged into hyperinflation after the First World War? Why was it the mark that collapsed into worthlessness? The key lies in the role of the bond market in war and post-war finance.

战争期间,所有交战国都大力推销战争债券,说服成千上万从未购买过政府债券的小储户,让他们相信购买债券是他们的爱国义务。然而,与英国、法国、意大利和俄罗斯不同,德国在战争期间无法进入国际债券市场(最初拒绝进入纽约市场,后来又被拒之门外)。协约国可以在美国或资本雄厚的英帝国境内出售债券,而同盟国(德国、奥匈帝国和土耳其)则只能依靠自身资源。柏林和维也纳是重要的金融中心,但它们的金融实力远不及伦敦、巴黎和纽约。因此,随着国内投资者的需求逐渐饱和,德国及其盟国出售战争债券的难度也逐渐加大。这种情况比英国来得更快,程度也更严重。德国和奥地利当局不得不向各自的中央银行寻求短期融资。中央银行持有的国库券数量激增预示着通货膨胀的到来,因为与向公众出售债券不同,将这些国库券兑换成纸币会增加货币供应量。到战争结束时,帝国约三分之一的债务处于“浮动”状态或无资金支持,造成了大量的货币过剩,而战时的价格管制才阻止了这种过剩演变为更高的通货膨胀。

All the warring countries went on war bonds sales-drives during the war, persuading thousands of small savers who had never previously purchased government bonds that it was their patriotic duty to do so. Unlike Britain, France, Italy and Russia, however, Germany did not have access to the international bond market during the war (having initially spurned the New York market and then been shut out of it). While the Entente powers could sell bonds in the United States or throughout the capital-rich British Empire, the Central powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey) were thrown back on their own resources. Berlin and Vienna were important financial centres, but they lacked the depth of London, Paris and New York. As a result, the sale of war bonds grew gradually more difficult for the Germans and their allies, as the appetite of domestic investors became sated. Much sooner, and to a much greater extent than in Britain, the German and Austrian authorities had to turn to their central banks for short-term funding. The growth of the volume of Treasury bills in the central bank’s hands was a harbinger of inflation because, unlike the sale of bonds to the public, exchanging these bills for banknotes increased the money supply. By the end of the war, roughly a third of the Reich debt was ‘floating’ or unfunded, and a substantial monetary overhang had been created, which only wartime price controls prevented from manifesting itself in higher inflation.

战败本身代价高昂。各方都曾向纳税人和债券持有人保证,战争费用将由敌人承担。如今,柏林的账单到期了。因此,理解战后恶性通货膨胀的一种方式是将其视为一种国家破产。购买战争债券的人投资于胜利的承诺;战败和革命意味着国家的破产,其主要负担必然由帝国的债权人承担。撇开战败不谈,1918年11月至1919年1月间的革命事件也难以安抚投资者。凡尔赛和会同样如此,它强加给新生的魏玛共和国一项未指明的赔款义务。当1921年最终确定赔款总额时,德国发现自己背负着巨额新外债,名义资本价值高达1320亿“金马克”(战前马克),相当于国民收入的三倍多。尽管并非所有新增债务都立即产生利息,但预定的赔款支付占1921年和1922年帝国全部支出的三分之一以上。任何一位在1921年夏天考虑过德国处境的投资者都不可能感到乐观,而战后流入德国的外国资本都是投机性或“热钱”,一旦形势变得艰难,这些资金很快就会撤离。

Defeat itself had a high price. All sides had reassured taxpayers and bondholders that the enemy would pay for the war. Now the bills fell due in Berlin. One way of understanding the post-war hyperinflation is therefore as a form of state bankruptcy. Those who had bought war bonds had invested in a promise of victory; defeat and revolution represented a national insolvency, the brunt of which necessarily had to be borne by the Reich’s creditors. Quite apart from defeat, the revolutionary events between November 1918 and January 1919 were scarcely calculated to reassure investors. Nor was the peace conference at Versailles, which imposed an unspecified reparations liability on the fledgling Weimar Republic. When the total indemnity was finally fixed in 1921, the Germans found themselves saddled with a huge new external debt with a nominal capital value of 132 billion ‘gold marks’ (pre-war marks), equivalent to more than three times national income. Although not all this new debt was immediately interest-bearing, the scheduled reparations payments accounted for more than a third of all Reich expenditure in 1921 and 1922. No investor who contemplated Germany’s position in the summer of 1921 could have felt optimistic, and such foreign capital as did flow into the country after the war was speculative or ‘hot’ money, which soon departed when the going got tough.

然而,如果将1923年的恶性通货膨胀仅仅视为《凡尔赛条约》的后果,那就大错特错了。当然,德国人乐于这样看待问题。他们在战后一直声称,赔款负担造成了巨大的经济压力。经常账户赤字难以为继;为了弥补赤字,别无选择,只能印制更多纸马克;通货膨胀是马克贬值的直接后果。所有这些都忽略了货币危机的国内政治根源。魏玛共和国的税收制度十分脆弱,这在很大程度上是因为新政权在高收入群体中缺乏合法性,他们拒绝缴纳强加于他们的税款。与此同时,公共资金被肆意挥霍,尤其是在为公共部门工会提供慷慨的工资待遇方面。税收不足和支出过度相结合,导致1919年和1920年出现巨额赤字(超过国民生产净值的10%),而此时战胜国甚至还没有提出赔款账单。1923年,德国暂停支付赔款后,赤字甚至更大。此外,20世纪20年代初魏玛共和国的经济政策制定者们认为,即便在1920年中期出现了稳定德国财政和货币政策的机会,他们也缺乏相应的动力。59德国金融精英普遍认为,货币失控贬值将迫使协约国修改赔款协议,因为这将降低德国出口相对于美国、英国和法国制成品的价格。马克贬值在一定程度上确实促进了德国出口。但德国人忽略的是,1920年至1922年间,通货膨胀引发的经济繁荣,正值美国和英国经济深陷战后衰退之际,却导致进口激增,从而抵消了他们原本希望施加的经济压力。德国恶性通货膨胀的根源在于这一误判。当法国人意识到德国官方履行赔款承诺的虚伪性后,他们得出结论:赔款必须以武力征收,于是入侵了工业重镇鲁尔区。德国人则以宣布总罢工(“非暴力抵抗”)作为回应,并用更多的纸币来筹集资金。恶性通货膨胀的最终结局至此到来。

Yet it would be wrong to see the hyperinflation of 1923 as a simple consequence of the Versailles Treaty. That was how the Germans liked to see it, of course. Their claim throughout the post-war period was that the reparations burden created an unsustainable current account deficit; that there was no alternative but to print yet more paper marks in order to finance it; that the inflation was a direct consequence of the resulting depreciation of the mark. All of this was to overlook the domestic political roots of the monetary crisis. The Weimar tax system was feeble, not least because the new regime lacked legitimacy among higher income groups who declined to pay the taxes imposed on them. At the same time, public money was spent recklessly, particularly on generous wage settlements for public sector unions. The combination of insufficient taxation and excessive spending created enormous deficits in 1919 and 1920 (in excess of 10 per cent of net national product), before the victors had even presented their reparations bill. The deficit in 1923, when Germany had suspended reparations payments, was even larger. Moreover, those in charge of Weimar economic policy in the early 1920s felt they had little incentive to stabilize German fiscal and monetary policy, even when an opportunity presented itself in the middle of 1920.59 A common calculation among Germany’s financial elites was that runaway currency depreciation would force the Allied powers into revising the reparations settlement, since the effect would be to cheapen German exports relative to American, British and French manufactures. It was true, as far as it went, that the downward slide of the mark boosted German exports. What the Germans overlooked was that the inflation-induced boom of 1920–22, at a time when the US and UK economies were in the depths of a post-war recession, caused an even bigger surge in imports, thus negating the economic pressure they had hoped to exert. At the heart of the German hyperinflation was a miscalculation. When the French cottoned on to the insincerity of official German pledges to fulfil their reparations commitments, they drew the conclusion that reparations would have to be collected by force and invaded the industrial Ruhr region. The Germans reacted by proclaiming a general strike (‘passive resistance’), which they financed with yet more paper money. The hyperinflationary endgame had now arrived.

正如米尔顿·弗里德曼所说,通货膨胀是一种货币现象。但恶性通货膨胀无论何时何地都是一种政治现象,因为如果没有一个国家政治经济的根本性失灵,恶性通货膨胀就不可能发生。当然,解决战后德国国民收入锐减导致的国内外债权人之间的相互冲突的索赔问题,肯定有不那么灾难性的方法。但内部僵局和外部对抗——根源在于许多德国人拒绝接受他们的帝国已被彻底击败的事实——导致了最糟糕的后果:货币和经济本身的彻底崩溃。到1923年底,流通中的马克约为4.97 × 10²⁰马克。日常流通的马克纸币高达200亿张。年通货膨胀率峰值达到1820亿%。物价平均比1913年高出1.26万亿倍。诚然,短期内也出现了一些好处。通过抑制储蓄和刺激消费,通货膨胀的加速刺激了产出和就业,这种情况一直持续到1922年最后一个季度。正如我们所见,马克贬值促进了德国出口。然而,1923年的崩溃由于被推迟而更加严重。工业生产下降到1913年水平的一半。失业率飙升,高峰时期达到工会成员的四分之一,另有四分之一的人从事短时工作。最糟糕的是危机造成的社会和心理创伤。“通货膨胀从最严格、最具体的意义上来说是一种群体现象,”埃利亚斯·卡内蒂后来在描述他年轻时在饱受通货膨胀蹂躏的法兰克福的经历时写道。“[它]是一场贬值的巫婆安息日,人和他们所拥有的货币单位相互影响。人与人相互代表,人们感觉自己和他们的货币一样‘糟糕’;而且这种情况越来越糟。他们都受制于它,都感到自己同样一文不值。” 60

Inflation is a monetary phenomenon, as Milton Friedman said. But hyperinflation is always and everywhere a political phenomenon, in the sense that it cannot occur without a fundamental malfunction of a country’s political economy. There surely were less catastrophic ways to settle the conflicting claims of domestic and foreign creditors on the diminished national income of post-war Germany. But a combination of internal gridlock and external defiance – rooted in the refusal of many Germans to accept that their empire had been fairly beaten – led to the worst of all possible outcomes: a complete collapse of the currency and of the economy itself. By the end of 1923 there were approximately 4.97 × 1020 marks in circulation. Twenty-billion mark notes were in everyday use. The annual inflation rate reached a peak of 182 billion per cent. Prices were on average 1.26 trillion times higher than they had been in 1913. True, there had been some short-term benefits. By discouraging saving and encouraging consumption, accelerating inflation had stimulated output and employment until the last quarter of 1922. The depreciating mark, as we have seen, had boosted German exports. Yet the collapse of 1923 was all the more severe for having been postponed. Industrial production dropped to half its 1913 level. Unemployment soared to, at its peak, a quarter of trade union members, with another quarter working short time. Worst of all was the social and psychological trauma caused by the crisis. ‘Inflation is a crowd phenomenon in the strictest and most concrete sense of the word,’ Elias Canetti later wrote of his experiences as a young man in inflation-stricken Frankfurt. ‘[It is] a witches’ sabbath of devaluation where men and the units of their money have the strongest effects on each other. The one stands for the other, men feeling themselves as “bad” as their money; and this becomes worse and worse. Together they are all at its mercy and all feel equally worthless.’60

恶性通货膨胀的代价:一张 1923 年 11 月发行的德国十亿马克纸币。实际上,这是一张万亿马克纸币,因为德语中的“milliard”相当于美国的十亿。

The price of hyperinflation: a German billion mark note from November 1923. In fact this is a trillion mark note, since the German term ‘milliard’ is equivalent to an American billion.

恶性通货膨胀的主要后果是货币贬值。不仅货币变得一文不值,所有以货币计价的财富和收入也都变得一文不值。其中包括债券。恶性通货膨胀无法消除德国的外债,因为这些外债是以战前货币计价的。但它确实能够消除所有在战争期间和战后积累的内债,如同毁灭性的经济地震一般夷平了债务山。其影响类似于征税:不仅对债券持有人征税,而且对所有依靠固定现金收入生活的人征税。这造成了巨大的阶层均衡,因为它主要影响的是中上阶层:食利者、高级公务员和专业人士。只有企业家才能通过提高价格、囤积美元、投资“实物资产”(例如房屋或工厂)以及用贬值的纸币偿还债务来保护自己。恶性通货膨胀留下的持久经济遗产已经足够糟糕:银行实力削弱,利率长期居高不下,而且利率中还包含了巨额的通胀风险溢价。但德国恶性通货膨胀带来的社会和政治后果才是最严重的。英国经济学家约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯在1923年提出,通过通货膨胀“消灭食利者比通过通货紧缩造成大规模失业更为可取——“因为在一个贫困的世界里,引发失业比让食利者失望更糟糕”。61然而,四年前,他他本人曾生动地描述了通货膨胀的负面后果:

Worthlessness was the hyperinflation’s principal product. Not only was money rendered worthless; so too were all the forms of wealth and income fixed in terms of that money. That included bonds. The hyperinflation could not wipe out Germany’s external debt, which had been fixed in pre-war currency. But it could and did wipe out all the internal debt that had been accumulated during and after the war, levelling the debt mountain like some devastating economic earthquake. The effect was akin to a tax: a tax not only on bondholders but also on anyone living on a fixed cash income. This amounted to a great levelling, since it affected primarily the upper middle classes: rentiers, senior civil servants, professionals. Only entrepreneurs were in a position to insulate themselves by adjusting prices upwards, hoarding dollars, investing in ‘real assets’ (such as houses or factories) and paying off debts in depreciating banknotes. The enduring economic legacy of the hyperinflation was bad enough: weakened banks and chronically high interest rates, which now incorporated a substantial inflation risk premium. But it was the social and political consequences of the German hyperinflation that were the most grievous. The English economist John Maynard Keynes had theorized in 1923 that the ‘euthanasia of the rentier’ through inflation was preferable to mass unemployment through deflation – ‘because it is worse in an impoverished world to provoke unemployment than to disappoint the rentier’.61 Yet four years earlier, he himself had given a vivid account of the negative consequences of inflation:

通过持续的通货膨胀,政府可以秘密地、不为人知地没收公民财富的很大一部分。通过这种方法,他们不仅没收财富,而且是任意没收;虽然这一过程使许多人变得贫困,但实际上却使一些人变得富有。这种财富的任意重新分配不仅动摇了人们的安全感,也动摇了人们对现有财富分配公平性的信心。那些从这个体系中获得意外之财的人……变成了“投机者”,他们成为资产阶级憎恨的对象,而通货膨胀使资产阶级和无产阶级一样贫困。随着通货膨胀的加剧……构成资本主义最终基础的债务人和债权人之间所有永久性的关系都变得彻底混乱,几乎失去了意义…… 62

By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls . . . become ‘profiteers’, who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds . . . all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless . . .62

凯恩斯认为列宁曾说过这样一句洞见:“要颠覆现有的社会基础,没有比败坏货币更巧妙、更可靠的方法了。”虽然没有记录表明列宁说过这样的话,但他的布尔什维克同僚叶夫根尼·普列奥布拉任斯基*确实将印钞机描述为“财政人民委员部的机关枪,它向资产阶级制度的后方倾泻火力”。 63

It was to Lenin that Keynes attributed the insight that ‘There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.’ No record survives of Lenin saying any such thing, but his fellow Bolshevik Yevgeni Preobrazhensky* did describe the banknote-printing press as ‘that machine-gun of the Commissariat of Finance which poured fire into the rear of the bourgeois system’.63

俄国的例子提醒我们,德国并非第一次世界大战后唯一遭受恶性通货膨胀的战败国。奥地利以及新独立的匈牙利和波兰,在1917年至1924年间也经历了类似的货币崩溃。就俄国而言,恶性通货膨胀发生在布尔什维克彻底违约,无力偿还沙皇的全部债务之后。债券持有者也将在……中遭遇类似的命运。二战结束后,德国、匈牙利和希​​腊的货币和债券市场都崩溃了

The Russian example is a reminder that Germany was not the only vanquished country to suffer hyperinflation after the First World War. Austria – as well as the newly independent Hungary and Poland – also suffered comparably bad currency collapses between 1917 and 1924. In the Russian case, hyperinflation came after the Bolsheviks had defaulted outright on the entire Tsarist debt. Bondholders would suffer similar fates in the aftermath of the Second World War, when Germany, Hungary and Greece all saw their currencies and bond markets collapse.*

如果恶性通货膨胀仅仅与世界大战的失败代价有关,那它就比较容易理解了。然而,这里却存在一个谜题。近年来,许多国家由于远没有那么严重的灾难,被迫拖欠债务——要么直接停止支付利息,要么间接贬值债务计价货币。为什么恶性通货膨胀的阴影没有像全球冲突的阴影一样消失呢?

If hyperinflation were exclusively associated with the costs of losing world wars, it would be relatively easy to understand. Yet there is a puzzle. In more recent times, a number of countries have been driven to default on their debts – either directly by suspending interest payments, or indirectly by debasing the currency in which the debts are denominated – as a result of far less serious disasters. Why is it that the spectre of hyperinflation has not been banished along with the spectre of global conflict?


PIMCO总裁比尔·格罗斯的赚钱生涯始于拉斯维加斯的二十一点牌桌。在他看来,投资者购买债券总带有赌博的成分。这种赌博的一部分在于,通货膨胀飙升不会侵蚀债券年度利息的价值。正如格罗斯解释的那样,“如果通货膨胀率上升到10%,而固定利率债券的价值只有5%,那么基本上意味着债券持有人的实际收益比通货膨胀率低5%。” 正如我们所见,通货膨胀上升的风险在于它会削弱投资本金和应付利息的购买力。正因如此,一旦出现通货膨胀上升的迹象,债券价格往往会下跌。即使在20世纪70年代,当全球通货膨胀飙升时,债券市场的表现也让内华达州的赌场看起来都像是更安全的投资场所。格罗斯清晰地记得美国通胀飙升至两位数的时期,1980年4月通胀率一度接近15%。正如他所说,“这对债券市场极为不利,并导致了……或许是历史上最严重的债券熊市,不仅是人们记忆中最严重的。” 确切地说,美国政府债券的实际年收益率……20世纪70年代的通货膨胀率为-3%,几乎与两次世界大战期间的通货膨胀一样严重。如今,只有少数几个国家的通货膨胀率超过10%,而只有津巴布韦遭受恶性通货膨胀的困扰。*但早在1979年,至少有7个国家的年通货膨胀率超过50%,包括英国和美国在内的60多个国家的通货膨胀率达到两位数。在受影响最严重的国家中,没有哪个国家比阿根廷遭受的长期损害更为严重。

PIMCO boss Bill Gross began his money-making career as a blackjack player in Las Vegas. To his eyes, there is always an element of gambling involved when an investor buys a bond. Part of that gamble is that an upsurge in inflation will not consume the value of the bond’s annual interest payments. As Gross explains it, ‘If inflation goes up to ten per cent and the value of a fixed rate interest is only five, then that basically means that the bond holder is falling behind inflation by five per cent.’ As we have seen, the danger that rising inflation poses is that it erodes the purchasing power of both the capital sum invested and the interest payments due. And that is why, at the first whiff of higher inflation, bond prices tend to fall. Even as recently as the 1970s, as inflation soared around the world, the bond market made a Nevada casino look like a pretty safe place to invest your money. Gross vividly recalls the time when US inflation was surging into double digits, peaking at just under 15 per cent in April 1980. As he puts it, ‘that was very bond-unfriendly, and it produced . . . perhaps the worst bond bear market not just in memory but in history.’ To be precise, real annual returns on US government bonds in the 1970s were minus 3 per cent, almost as bad as during the inflationary years of the world wars. Today, only a handful of countries have inflation rates above 10 per cent and only one, Zimbabwe, is afflicted with hyperinflation.* But back in 1979 at least seven countries had an annual inflation rate above 50 per cent and more than sixty countries, including Britain and the United States, had inflation in double digits. Among the countries worst affected, none suffered more severe long-term damage than Argentina.

阿根廷曾是繁荣的代名词。这个国家的名字本身就意味着“白银之地”。首都布宜诺斯艾利斯坐落在拉普拉塔河畔——拉普拉塔河,意为“银色的河流”——这里指的并非河水浑浊的棕色,而是上游蕴藏的银矿。根据近期的估计,1913年,阿根廷是世界上最富有的十个国家之一。在英语国家之外,人均国内生产总值高于阿根廷的只有瑞士、比利时、荷兰和丹麦。1870年至1913年间,阿根廷的经济增长速度超过了美国和德国。当时,外国在阿根廷的投资几乎与在加拿大的投资相当。世界上曾经有两家哈罗德百货公司,一家位于伦敦骑士桥,另一家位于布宜诺斯艾利斯市中心的佛罗里达大道,这绝非巧合。阿根廷完全有理由渴望成为南半球的英国,甚至美国。 1946年2月,新当选的总统胡安·多明戈·庇隆将军视察布宜诺斯艾利斯中央银行时,眼前的景象令他震惊不已。“这里到处都是黄金,”他惊叹道,“走廊里几乎寸步难行。”

Once, Argentina was a byword for prosperity. The country’s very name means the land of silver. The river on whose banks the capital Buenos Aires stands is the Rio de la Plata – in English the Silver River – a reference not to its colour, which is muddy brown, but to the silver deposits supposed to lie upstream. In 1913, according to recent estimates, Argentina was one of the ten richest countries in the world. Outside the English-speaking world, per capita gross domestic product was higher in only Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark. Between 1870 and 1913, Argentina’s economy had grown faster than those of both the United States and Germany. There was almost as much foreign capital invested there as in Canada. It is no coincidence that there were once two Harrods stores in the world: one in Knightsbridge, in London, the other on the Avenida Florida, in the heart of Buenos Aires. Argentina could credibly aspire to be the United Kingdom, if not the United States, of the southern hemisphere. In February 1946, when the newly elected president General Juan Domingo Perón visited the central bank in Buenos Aires, he was astonished at what he saw. ‘There is so much gold,’ he marvelled, ‘you can hardly walk through the corridors.’

二十世纪阿根廷的经济史就是一个活生生的教训,它表明世界上所有的资源都可能因为金融管理不善而付诸东流。尤其是在第二次世界大战之后。二战期间,该国经济表现一直落后于邻国和世界大部分地区。例如,在20世纪60年代和70年代,该国经济状况极其糟糕,以至于1988年的人均GDP与1959年持平。到1998年,其人均GDP已跌至美国的34%,而1913年则为72%。该国已被新加坡、日本、台湾和韩国等国家超越——最令人痛心的是,其邻国智利也未能幸免。究竟出了什么问题?一个可能的答案是通货膨胀,该国在1945年至1952年、1956年至1968年以及1970年至1974年期间的通货膨胀率均达到两位数; 1975年至1990年间,阿根廷通货膨胀率高达三位数(甚至四位数),1989年更是达到年增长率5000%的峰值。另一个原因是债务违约:阿根廷在1982年、1989年、2002年和2004年都未能偿还外国债权人的债务。然而,这些解释并不完全充分。1870年至1914年间,阿根廷至少有八年经历了两位数的通货膨胀。同期,阿根廷至少两次出现债务违约。要理解阿根廷的经济衰退,我们必须再次认识到,通货膨胀既是一种货币现象,也是一种政治现象。

The economic history of Argentina in the twentieth century is an object lesson that all the resources in the world can be set at nought by financial mismanagement. Particularly after the Second World War the country consistently underperformed its neighbours and most of the rest of the world. So miserably did it fare in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, that its per capita GDP was the same in 1988 as it had been in 1959. By 1998 it had sunk to 34 per cent of the US level, compared with 72 per cent in 1913. It had been overtaken by, among others, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea – not forgetting, most painful of all, the country next door, Chile. What went wrong? One possible answer is inflation, which was in double digits between 1945 and 1952, between 1956 and 1968 and between 1970 and 1974; and in treble (or quadruple) digits between 1975 and 1990, peaking at an annual rate of 5,000 per cent in 1989. Another answer is debt default: Argentina let down foreign creditors in 1982, 1989, 2002 and 2004. Yet these answers will not quite suffice. Argentina had suffered double-digit inflation in at least eight years between 1870 and 1914. It had defaulted on its debts at least twice in the same period. To understand Argentina’s economic decline, it is once again necessary to see that inflation was a political as much as a monetary phenomenon.

一个由地主组成的寡头集团曾试图将国家经济建立在向英语世界出口农产品的基础上,但这种模式在大萧条时期彻底失败。大规模移民涌入,却没有像北美那样释放农业用地供移民定居,这导致城市工人阶级规模过大,极易受到民粹主义动员的影响。从1930年推翻何塞·F·乌里布鲁的政变开始,军事干预政治的屡次发生,为贝隆领导下一种新型的准法西斯政治铺平了道路。贝隆似乎为所有人提供了好处:提高工人的工资和改善工作条件,并为工业家提供保护性关税。在1955年(贝隆被推翻)至1966年间,曾有人尝试推行一种反劳工的替代方案,该方案依靠货币贬值来试图调和农业和工业的利益。1966年的另一次军事政变承诺实现技术现代化,但结果却是货币进一步贬值,通货膨胀加剧。 1973 年庇隆的回归是一场惨败,恰逢正如全球通胀飙升之初的情况一样,阿根廷的年通胀率也随之飙升至444%。又一次军事政变将阿根廷推入暴力漩涡,国家重组进程(Proceso de Reorganización Nacional)导致数千人遭到任意拘留和“失踪”。从经济角度来看,军政府除了让阿根廷背负迅速增长的外债之外,一无所获。到1984年,阿根廷的外债占GDP的比重超过了60%(尽管这还不到20世纪初债务峰值的一半)。正如通胀危机中经常出现的情况一样,战争也扮演了重要角色:国内战争是针对所谓的颠覆分子,国外战争则是针对英国的福克兰群岛争端。然而,如果将此视为又一个战败政权通过通货膨胀来偿还债务的案例,那就大错特错了。阿根廷通货膨胀失控的根源并非战争,而是各种社会力量的交织:寡头、考迪罗、生产者利益集团和工会——当然还有贫困的底层阶级,即“赤膊者”( descamizados)。简而言之,没有哪个重要群体真正关心物价稳定。资本所有者热衷于赤字和货币贬值;劳动力提供者则早已习惯了工资-物价螺旋式上升。政府赤字融资方式从国内转向外部融资,意味着债券持有被外包。64正是在这样的背景下,我们才能理解阿根廷历次货币稳定计划的失败。

An oligarchy of landowners had sought to base the country’s economy on agricultural exports to the English-speaking world, a model that failed comprehensively in the Depression. Large-scale immigration without (as in North America) the freeing of agricultural land for settlement had created a disproportionately large urban working class that was highly susceptible to populist mobilization. Repeated military interventions in politics, beginning with the coup that installed José F. Uriburu in 1930, paved the way for a new kind of quasi-fascistic politics under Perón, who seemed to offer something for everyone: better wages and conditions for workers and protective tariffs for industrialists. The anti-labour alternative to Perón, which was attempted between 1955 (when he was deposed) and 1966, relied on currency devaluation to try to reconcile the interests of agriculture and industry. Another military coup in 1966 promised technological modernization but instead delivered more devaluation, and higher inflation. Perón’s return in 1973 was a fiasco, coinciding as it did with the onset of a global upsurge in inflation. Annual inflation surged to 444 per cent. Yet another military coup plunged Argentina into violence as the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (National Reorganization Process) condemned thousands to arbitrary detention and ‘disappearance’. In economic terms, the junta achieved precisely nothing other than to saddle Argentina with a rapidly growing external debt, which by 1984 exceeded 60 per cent of GDP (though this was less than half the peak level of indebtedness attained in the early 1900s). As so often in inflationary crises, war played a part: internally against supposed subversives, externally against Britain over the Falkland Islands. Yet it would be wrong to see this as yet another case of a defeated regime liquidating its debts through inflation. What made Argentina’s inflation so unmanageable was not war, but the constellation of social forces: the oligarchs, the caudillos, the producers’ interest groups and the trade unions – not forgetting the impoverished underclass or descamizados (literally the shirtless). To put it simply, there was no significant group with an interest in price stability. Owners of capital were attracted to deficits and devaluation; sellers of labour grew accustomed to a wage–price spiral. The gradual shift from financing government deficits domestically to financing them externally meant that bondholding was outsourced.64 It is against this background that the failure of successive plans for Argentine currency stabilization must be understood.

在阿根廷最伟大的作家豪尔赫·路易斯·博尔赫斯的短篇小说《岔路花园》中,他虚构了中国圣贤崔潘的写作风格:

In his short story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, Argentina’s greatest writer Jorge Luis Borges imagined the writing of a Chinese sage, Ts’ui Pên:

在所有虚构作品中,每当一个人面临多种选择时,他都会选择其中一种,排除其他选项;而在崔鹏的虚构作品中,他却同时选择了所有选项。以此创造了多元的未来;多元的时代,而这些时代本身也在不断增殖和分叉……在崔鹏的作品中,所有可能的结果都会出现;每一个结果都是……走向其他分岔……[崔潘]不相信存在统一的、绝对的时间。他相信存在一个无限的时间序列,一个不断增长、令人眼花缭乱的、由发散的、收敛的和平行的时间交织而成的网络。65

In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures; diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork . . . In the work of Ts’ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings . . . [Ts’ui Pên] did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times.65

这恰如其分地比喻了阿根廷过去三十年的金融历史。贝尔纳多·格林斯潘尝试债务重组和凯恩斯主义的需求管理,而胡安·苏鲁伊则尝试货币改革(澳斯特拉尔计划)以及工资和物价管制。然而,两人都未能引导关键利益集团走上各自的道路。公共支出持续超过税收收入;要求提前结束工资和物价管制的呼声高涨;通货膨胀在短暂的稳定期后再次抬头。最终,两条道路在1989年灾难性地汇合:东欧迎来了奇迹之年,而阿根廷则遭遇了灾难之年。

This is not a bad metaphor for Argentine financial history in the past thirty years. Where Bernardo Grinspun attempted debt rescheduling and Keynesian demand management, Juan Sourrouille tried currency reform (the Austral Plan) along with wage and price controls. Neither was able to lead the critical interest groups down his own forking path. Public expenditure continued to exceed tax revenue; arguments for a premature end to wage and price controls prevailed; inflation resumed after only the most fleeting of stabilizations. The forking paths finally and calamitously reconverged in 1989: the annus mirabilis in Eastern Europe; the annus horribilis in Argentina.

1989年2月,阿根廷遭遇了有记录以来最炎热的夏季之一。布宜诺斯艾利斯的电力系统不堪重负,人们逐渐习惯了长达五小时的停电。为了阻止货币汇率崩溃,政府下令银行和外汇兑换机构关闭。然而,政府的努力失败了:短短一个月内,阿根廷比索兑美元汇率暴跌了64%。与此同时,世界银行冻结了对阿根廷的贷款,称政府未能解决其庞大的公共部门赤字问题。私人贷款机构也同样缺乏热情。投资者几乎不可能购买那些通货膨胀会在几天内抹去债券实际价值的债券。随着人们越来越担心央行的储备即将耗尽,债券价格暴跌。走投无路的政府只剩下一个选择:印钞。但即便如此也失败了。4月28日星期五,阿根廷的货币彻底耗尽。“这是一个实实在在的问题,”央行副行长罗伯托·艾尔鲍姆在新闻发布会上说道。造币厂的纸张真的用完了,印刷工人也罢工了。“我不知道该怎么办,但钱必须在星期一之前到位,”他坦白道。

In February 1989 Argentina was suffering one of the hottest summers on record. The electricity system in Buenos Aires struggled to cope. People grew accustomed to five-hour power cuts. Banks and foreign exchange houses were ordered to close as the government tried to prevent the currency’s exchange rate from collapsing. It failed: in the space of just a month the austral fell 64 per cent against the dollar. At the same time, the World Bank froze lending to Argentina, saying that the government had failed to tackle its bloated public sector deficit. Private sector lenders were no more enthusiastic. Investors were hardly likely to buy bonds with the prospect that inflation would wipe out their real value within days. As fears grew that the central bank’s reserves were running out, bond prices plunged. There was only one option left for a desperate government: the printing press. But even that failed. On Friday 28 April Argentina literally ran out of money. ‘It’s a physical problem,’ Central Bank Vice President Roberto Eilbaum told a news conference. The mint had literally run out of paper and the printers had gone on strike. ‘I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but the money has got to be there on Monday,’ he confessed.

到了6月,随着月度通货膨胀率飙升至100%以上,民众的愤怒情绪已接近沸点。早在4月,布宜诺斯艾利斯一家超市的顾客就因超市管理层通过广播宣布所有商品价格将立即上涨30%而掀翻了装满商品的购物车。6月,阿根廷第二大城市罗萨里奥爆发了为期两天的骚乱和抢劫,造成至少14人死亡。然而,与魏玛共和国时期一样,阿根廷恶性通货膨胀的主要受害者并非普通工人,因为他们更有可能通过工资增长来应对物价上涨,而是那些依赖固定收入的人,例如领取固定工资的公务员或学者,以及依靠储蓄利息生活的退休人员。此外,与20世纪20年代的德国一样,主要的受益者是那些背负巨额债务的人,他们的债务实际上被通货膨胀抹去了。受益者中也包括政府本身,因为政府所欠的款项是以澳元计价的。

By June, with the monthly inflation rate rising above 100 per cent, popular frustration was close to boiling point. Already in April customers in one Buenos Aires supermarket had overturned trolleys full of goods after the management announced over a loudspeaker that all prices would immediately be raised by 30 per cent. For two days in June crowds in Argentina’s second largest city, Rosario, ran amok in an eruption of rioting and looting that left at least fourteen people dead. As in the Weimar Republic, however, the principal losers of Argentina’s hyperinflation were not ordinary workers, who stood a better chance of matching price hikes with pay rises, but those reliant on incomes fixed in cash terms, like civil servants or academics on inflexible salaries, or pensioners living off the interest on their savings. And, as in 1920s Germany, the principal beneficiaries were those with large debts, which were effectively wiped out by inflation. Among those beneficiaries was the government itself, in so far as the money it owed was denominated in australes.

然而,阿根廷的债务并非都能如此轻易地摆脱。到1983年,该国以美元计价的外债高达460亿美元,约占国民生产总值的40%。无论阿根廷货币如何波动,这笔以美元计价的债务始终保持不变。事实上,随着各国政府急于求成地借入更多美元,债务反而不断增长。到1989年,阿根廷的外债已超过650亿美元。在接下来的十年里,外债持续攀升,最终达到1550亿美元。国内债权人早已饱受通货膨胀的折磨。但只有违约才能使阿根廷摆脱外债负担。正如我们所见,阿根廷此前曾多次走上这条路。1890年,由于阿根廷政府拖欠外债,巴林兄弟公司(Baring Brothers)因其在阿根廷证券(尤其是布宜诺斯艾利斯供水排水公司债券发行失败)的投资而濒临破产。正是巴林银行的老对手罗斯柴尔德家族说服英国政府出资100万英镑,最终成立了1700万英镑的救助基金,其原则是巴林银行的倒闭……这将是“英国在世界各地的商业的一场巨大灾难”。66 正是第一位罗斯柴尔德勋爵主持了一个由银行家组成的委员会,旨在对桀骜不驯的阿根廷人进行改革。未来的贷款将以货币改革为条件,通过一个独立且僵化的货币局将比索与黄金挂钩。 67然而,一个世纪后,罗斯柴尔德家族对阿根廷的葡萄园比对阿根廷的债务更感兴趣。国际货币基金组织不得不承担起这项吃力不讨好的任务:试图避免(或至少减轻)阿根廷违约的影响。而补救措施依然是货币局制度,这一次是将比索与美元挂钩。

Yet not all Argentina’s debts could be got rid of so easily. By 1983 the country’s external debt, which was denominated in US dollars, stood at $46 billion, equivalent to around 40 per cent of national output. No matter what happened to the Argentine currency, this dollar-denominated debt stayed the same. Indeed, it tended to grow as desperate governments borrowed yet more dollars. By 1989 the country’s external debt was over $65 billion. Over the next decade it would continue to grow until it reached $155 billion. Domestic creditors had already been mulcted by inflation. But only default could rid Argentina of its foreign debt burden. As we have seen, Argentina had gone down this road more than once before. In 1890 Baring Brothers had been brought to the brink of bankruptcy by its investments in Argentine securities (notably a failed issue of bonds for the Buenos Aires Water Supply and Drainage Company) when the Argentine government defaulted on its external debt. It was the Barings’ old rivals the Rothschilds who persuaded the British government to contribute £1 million towards what became a £17 million bailout fund, on the principle that the collapse of Barings would be ‘a terrific calamity for English commerce all over the world’.66 And it was also the first Lord Rothschild who chaired a committee of bankers set up to impose reform on the wayward Argentines. Future loans would be conditional on a currency reform that pegged the peso to gold by means of an independent and inflexible currency board.67 A century later, however, the Rothschilds were more interested in Argentine vineyards than in Argentine debt. It was the International Monetary Fund that had to perform the thankless task of trying to avert (or at least mitigate the effects of) an Argentine default. Once again the remedy was a currency board, this time pegging the currency to the dollar.

1991年,财政部长多明戈·卡瓦略推出可兑换比索,这是阿根廷在一个世纪内使用的第六种货币。然而,这一举措最终也以失败告终。诚然,到1996年,通货膨胀率已降至零;事实上,1999年甚至转为负值。但失业率高达15%,收入不平等状况也仅比尼日利亚略好一些。此外,货币紧缩政策从未伴随财政紧缩;由于中央和地方政府都选择在国际债券市场融资而非平衡预算,公共债务占GDP的比重从1994年底的35%上升到2001年底的64%。简而言之,尽管卡瓦略将货币与通货膨胀挂钩,甚至大幅降低了通货膨胀率,但他未能改变导致过去多次货币危机的根本社会和制度因素。阿根廷再次违约,以及另一种货币的诞生,似乎已成定局。在1月份(150亿美元)和5月份(80亿美元)两次救助之后,国际货币基金组织拒绝提供第三次援助。2001年12月23日,在人均GDP痛苦地下降了12%的一年即将结束之际,政府宣布暂停偿还所有外债,其中包括价值810亿美元的债券:按名义价值计算,这是历史上最大的债务违约。

When the new peso convertible was introduced by Finance Minister Domingo Cavallo in 1991, it was the sixth Argentine currency in the space of a century. Yet this remedy, too, ended in failure. True, by 1996 inflation had been brought down to zero; indeed, it turned negative in 1999. But unemployment stood at 15 per cent and income inequality was only marginally better than in Nigeria. Moreover, monetary stricture was never accompanied by fiscal stricture; public debt rose from 35 per cent of GDP at the end of 1994 to 64 per cent at the end of 2001 as central and provincial governments alike tapped the international bond market rather than balance their budgets. In short, despite pegging the currency and even slashing inflation, Cavallo had failed to change the underlying social and institutional drivers that had caused so many monetary crises in the past. The stage was set for yet another Argentine default, and yet another currency. After two bailouts in January ($15 billion) and May ($8 billion), the IMF declined to throw a third lifeline. On 23 December 2001, at the end of a year in which per capita GDP had declined by an agonizing 12 per cent, the government announced a moratorium on the entirety of its foreign debt, including bonds worth $81 billion: in nominal terms the biggest debt default in history.

阿根廷的历史表明,债券市场的力量远不如乍看之下那么强大。平均基差为295。19世纪80年代阿根廷债券与英国债券之间的点差,对于像巴林银行这样的投资者而言,几乎不足以弥补他们在阿根廷投资所承担的风险。同样,1998年至2000年间阿根廷债券与美国债券之间平均664个基点的点差,也严重低估了卡瓦洛货币挂钩制度开始瓦解时可能出现的违约风险。违约消息公布后,点差飙升至5500个基点;到2002年3月,点差更是超过了7000个基点。经过漫长而痛苦的谈判(涉及152种债券,以六种不同的货币计价,并受八个司法管辖区管辖),约50万债权人中的大多数最终同意接受面值约为35%的新债券,这是债券市场历史上最严重的“减记”之一。68阿根廷的违约如此成功(此后经济增长强劲,债券利差也回升至300-500个基点),以至于许多经济学家不禁思考,为什么会有主权债务人履行其对外国债券持有人的承诺。69

The history of Argentina illustrates that the bond market is less powerful than it might first appear. The average 295 basis point spread between Argentine and British bonds in the 1880s scarcely compensated investors like the Barings for the risks they were running by investing in Argentina. In the same way, the average 664 basis point spread between Argentine and US bonds from 1998 to 2000 significantly underpriced the risk of default as the Cavallo currency peg began to crumble. When the default was announced, the spread rose to 5,500; by March 2002 it exceeded 7,000 basis points. After painfully protracted negotiations (there were 152 varieties of paper involved, denominated in six different currencies and governed by eight jurisdictions) the majority of approximately 500,000 creditors agreed to accept new bonds worth roughly 35 cents on the dollar, one of the most drastic ‘haircuts’ in the history of the bond market.68 So successful did Argentina’s default prove (economic growth has since surged while bond spreads are back in the 300–500 basis point range) that many economists were left to ponder why any sovereign debtor ever honours its commitments to foreign bondholders.69

食利者的复活

The Resurrection of the Rentier

正如我们所见,凯恩斯在20世纪20年代曾预言“食利者的安乐死”,他预见通货膨胀最终会吞噬所有将资金投入政府债券的人的纸面财富。然而,在我们这个时代,我们见证了债券持有者的奇迹般复苏。继20世纪70年代的大通货膨胀之后,过去三十年间,各国纷纷将通货膨胀率降至个位数。即使在阿根廷,官方通货膨胀率也低于10%,尽管门多萨省和圣路易斯省汇总的非官方估计值超过20%。)随着通货膨胀的下降,债券价格也随之上涨,这堪称现代史上最伟大的债券牛市之一。更值得注意的是,尽管发生了惊人的阿根廷债务违约——更不用说1998年俄罗斯的债务违约——新兴市场债券的利差却持续下降。2007年初,股市跌至第一次世界大战前以来的最低点,这表明人们对经济前景抱有近乎坚定的信心。邦德先生去世的传言显然被证明是夸大其词。

In the 1920s, as we have seen, Keynes had predicted the ‘euthanasia of the rentier’, anticipating that inflation would eventually eat up all the paper wealth of those who had put their money in government bonds. In our time, however, we have seen a miraculous resurrection of the bondholder. After the Great Inflation of the 1970s, the past thirty years have seen one country after another reduce inflation to single digits.70 (Even in Argentina, the official inflation rate is below 10 per cent, though unofficial estimates compiled by the provinces of Mendoza and San Luis put it above 20 per cent.) And, as inflation has fallen, so bonds have rallied in what has been one of the great bond bull markets of modern history. Even more remarkably, despite the spectacular Argentine default – not to mention Russia’s in 1998 – the spreads on emerging market bonds have trended steadily downwards, reaching lows in early 2007 that had not been seen since before the First World War, implying an almost unshakeable confidence in the economic future. Rumours of the death of Mr Bond have clearly proved to be exaggerated.

通货膨胀下降的部分原因是,从服装到电脑,我们购买的许多商品价格因技术创新和生产转移到亚洲低工资经济体而降低。通货膨胀的降低也得益于全球货币政策的转型,这一转型始于20世纪70年代末80年代初英国央行和美联储受货币主义影响而实施的短期利率上调,并随着90年代央行独立性和明确目标的推广而持续推进。同样重要的是,正如阿根廷的例子所示,一些通货膨胀的结构性驱动因素也已减弱。工会的影响力有所下降。亏损的国有企业已被私有化。但或许最重要的是,对债券实际收益感兴趣的社会群体不断壮大。在发达国家,越来越多的财富以私人养老基金和其他储蓄机构的形式持有,这些机构被要求(或至少被期望)将其大部分资产配置于政府债券和其他固定收益证券。2007年,一项针对11个主要经济体养老基金的调查显示,债券占其资产的四分之一以上,虽然远低于过去几十年的水平,但仍然占相当大的比例。71随着退休人员比例的增加,依靠这些基金收入生活的人口比例逐年上升。

Inflation has come down partly because many of the items we buy, from clothes to computers, have got cheaper as a result of technological innovation and the relocation of production to low-wage economies in Asia. It has also been reduced because of a worldwide transformation in monetary policy, which began with the monetarist-inspired increases in short-term rates implemented by the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and continued with the spread of central bank independence and explicit targets in the 1990s. Just as importantly, as the Argentine case shows, some of the structural drivers of inflation have also weakened. Trade unions have become less powerful. Loss-making state industries have been privatized. But, perhaps most importantly of all, the social constituency with an interest in positive real returns on bonds has grown. In the developed world a rising share of wealth is held in the form of private pension funds and other savings institutions that are required, or at least expected, to hold a high proportion of their assets in the form of government bonds and other fixed income securities. In 2007 a survey of pension funds in eleven major economies revealed that bonds accounted for more than a quarter of their assets, substantially lower than in past decades, but still a substantial share.71 With every passing year, the proportion of the population living off the income from such funds goes up, as the share of retirees increases.

这就把我们带回了意大利,债券市场的发源地。1965年,在大通胀前夕,意大利只有10%的人口年龄在65岁及以上。如今,这一比例翻了一番,约为五分之一。联合国预测,到2050年,这一比例将接近三分之一。在这样一个老龄化严重的社会中,对固定收益证券的需求巨大且日益增长,同时低通胀也至关重要,以确保其支付的利息能够保持购买力。随着越来越多的人离开……劳动力短缺和持续的公共部门赤字确保债券市场永远不会缺少新债券可供出售。而意大利已将货币主权移交给欧洲中央银行,这意味着意大利政客再也没有机会印钞并引发通货膨胀螺旋式上升。

Which brings us back to Italy, the land where the bond market was born. In 1965, on the eve of the Great Inflation, just 10 per cent of Italians were aged 65 or over. Today the proportion is twice that: around a fifth. And by 2050 it is projected by the United Nations to be just under a third. In such a greying society, there is a huge and growing need for fixed income securities, and for low inflation to ensure that the interest they pay retains its purchasing power. As more and more people leave the workforce, recurrent public sector deficits ensure that the bond market will never be short of new bonds to sell. And the fact that Italy has surrendered its monetary sovereignty to the European Central Bank means that there should never be another opportunity for Italian politicians to print money and set off the inflationary spiral.

但这并不意味着债券市场像詹姆斯·卡维尔所认为的那样主宰着世界。事实上,他在上世纪90年代与债券市场相关的那种纪律,在克林顿总统的继任者乔治·W·布什执政期间明显缺失。就在布什总统当选前几个月,2000年9月7日,纽约时代广场的“国债时钟”关闭了。当天,时钟显示:“我们的国债:5,676,989,904,887美元。您的家庭应承担:73,733美元。”在经历了三年的预算盈余之后,两位总统候选人都声称偿还国债是一个可行的项目。据CNN报道。

That does not mean, however, that the bond market rules the world in the sense that James Carville meant. Indeed, the kind of discipline he associated with the bond market in the 1990s has been conspicuous by its absence under President Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush. Just months before President Bush’s election, on 7 September 2000, the National Debt Clock in New York’s Times Square was shut down. On that day it read as follows: ‘Our national debt: $5,676,989,904,887. Your family share: $73,733.’ After three years of budget surpluses, both candidates for the presidency were talking as if paying off the national debt was a viable project. According to CNN

民主党总统候选人阿尔·戈尔概述了一项计划,他声称该计划将在2012年之前消除债务。德克萨斯州州长、共和党总统候选人乔治·W·布什的高级经济顾问们同意偿还债务的原则,但尚未承诺具体的消除债务日期。72

Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore has outlined a plan that he says would eliminate the debt by 2012. Senior economic advisers to Texas Governor and Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush agree with the principle of paying down the debt but have not committed to a specific date for eliminating it.72

后一位候选人缺乏诚意,这本身就是一种暗示。在布什执政期间,他的政府在八年中有七年都出现了预算赤字。联邦债务从5万亿美元飙升至超过9万亿美元。2008年,国会预算办公室预测,到2017年,联邦债务将继续攀升至超过12万亿美元。然而,债券市场非但没有惩罚这种挥霍无度的行为,反而给予了积极的回报。从2000年12月到2008年11月,十年期美国国债收益率从5.24%下降至3.53%。

That lack of commitment on the latter candidate’s part was by way of being a hint. During Bush’s time in the White House, his administration ran a budget deficit in seven out of eight years. The federal debt increased from $5 trillion to more than $9 trillion. In 2008 the Congressional Budget Office forecast a continued rise to more than $12 trillion by 2017. Yet, far from punishing this profligacy, the bond market positively rewarded it. Between December 2000 and November 2008, the yield on ten-year Treasury bonds declined from 5.24 per cent to 3.53 per cent.

然而,我们根本无法理解这种“难题”——正如艾伦·格林斯潘所称的债券收益率未能对市场做出反应的这种现象。短期利率上涨73% ——这是通过单独研究债券市场得出的结论。因此,我们现在将从政府债券市场转向其更年轻、在许多方面也更具活力的“兄弟”:公司股权市场,也就是我们常说的股票市场。

It is, however, impossible to make sense of this ‘conundrum’ – as Alan Greenspan called this failure of bond yields to respond to short-term interest rate rises73 – by studying the bond market in isolation. We therefore turn now from the market for government debt to its younger and in many ways more dynamic sibling: the market for shares in corporate equity, known colloquially as the stock market.

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吹泡泡

Blowing Bubbles

安第斯山脉绵延四千多英里,宛如一条锯齿状的脊柱,蜿蜒于南美大陆西侧。大约一亿年前,纳斯卡板块开始缓慢而剧烈地滑入南美板块之下,安第斯山脉由此形成。其最高峰,位于阿根廷的阿空加瓜山,海拔超过22000英尺。阿空加瓜山在智利的几座山峰如同闪耀的白色哨兵,环绕着圣地亚哥。然而,只有当你置身于玻利维亚高原,才能真正感受到安第斯山脉的雄伟壮丽。当从拉巴斯到的的喀喀湖的路上,雨云散去,群山映入眼帘,在天际线上勾勒出一道耀眼夺目的锯齿状轮廓。

The Andes stretch for more than four thousand miles like a jagged, crooked spine down the western side of the South American continent. Formed roughly a hundred million years ago, as the Nazca tectonic plate began its slow but tumultuous slide beneath the South American plate, their highest peak, Mount Aconcagua in Argentina, rises more than 22,000 feet above sea level. Aconcagua’s smaller Chilean brethren stand like gleaming white sentinels around Santiago. But it is only when you are up in the Bolivian highlands that you really grasp the sheer scale of the Andes. When the rain clouds lift on the road from La Paz to Lake Titicaca, the mountains dominate the skyline, tracing a dazzling, irregular saw-tooth right across the horizon.

眺望安第斯山脉,很难想象任何人类组织能够克服如此巨大的自然屏障。但对于一家美国公司而言,其嶙峋的山峰并不比东侧茂密的亚马逊雨林更具威慑力。这家公司着手修建一条天然气管道,从玻利维亚横跨整个大陆到达巴西的大西洋沿岸;另一条——也是世界上最长的管道——从巴塔哥尼亚半岛的最南端延伸至阿根廷首都布宜诺斯艾利斯。

Looking at the Andes, it is hard to imagine that any kind of human organization could overcome such a vast natural barrier. But for one American company, their jagged peaks were no more daunting than the dense Amazonian rainforests that lie to the east of them. That company set out to construct a gas pipeline from Bolivia across the continent to the Atlantic coast of Brazil, and another – the longest in the world – from the tip of Patagonia to the Argentine capital Buenos Aires.

这些宏伟的计划体现了现代资本主义的雄心壮志,而这一切的实现都得益于现代世界最基本的制度之一:公司的发明。正是公司使得成千上万的人能够汇集资源,开展高风险、长期的项目。在实现利润之前,需要投入巨额资本。因此,在银行业出现和债券市场诞生之后,货币崛起故事的下一步便是股份制有限责任公司的兴起:股份制是因为公司的资本由多个投资者共同拥有;有限责任是因为公司作为独立的法人实体,可以保护投资者免于在企业失败时损失全部财富。他们的责任仅限于用于购买公司股份的资金。规模较小的企业或许可以像合伙企业一样运作。但那些渴望跨越洲际的企业则需要公司这种组织形式

Such grand schemes, exemplifying the vaulting ambition of modern capitalism, were made possible by the invention of one of the most fundamental institutions of the modern world: the company. It is the company that enables thousands of individuals to pool their resources for risky, long-term projects that require the investment of vast sums of capital before profits can be realized. After the advent of banking and the birth of the bond market, the next step in the story of the ascent of money was therefore the rise of the joint-stock, limited-liability corporation: joint-stock because the company’s capital was jointly owned by multiple investors; limited-liability because the separate existence of the company as a legal ‘person’ protected the investors from losing all their wealth if the venture failed. Their liability was limited to the money they had used to buy a stake in the company. Smaller enterprises might operate just as well as partnerships. But those who aspired to span continents needed the company.1

然而,企业改变全球经济的能力还取决于另一项相关的创新。理论上,股份制公司的管理层应该受到警惕的股东的约束,这些股东会参加年度股东大会,并试图通过非执行董事直接或间接地施加影响。实际上,对公司的主要约束来自股票市场,在那里,几乎无数小股公司股份(你可以称之为股票、股份或股权,随你喜欢)每天都在买卖。本质上,人们愿意为一家公司的股份支付的价格反映了他们认为该公司未来能赚多少钱。实际上,股票市场每小时都在对在其交易的股票进行公投:检验其管理质量、产品吸引力以及主要市场的前景。

However, the ability of companies to transform the global economy depended on another, related innovation. In theory, the managers of joint-stock companies are supposed to be disciplined by vigilant shareholders, who attend annual meetings, and seek to exert influence directly or indirectly through non-executive directors. In practice, the primary discipline on companies is exerted by stock markets, where an almost infinite number of small slices of companies (call them stocks, shares or equities, whichever you prefer) are bought and sold every day. In essence, the price people are prepared to pay for a piece of a company tells you how much money they think that company will make in the future. In effect, stock markets hold hourly referendums on the companies whose shares are traded there: on the quality of their management, on the appeal of their products, on the prospects of their principal markets.

然而,股市也有其自身的运行规律。未来在很大程度上充满不确定性,因此我们对公司未来盈利能力的评估必然会有所不同。如果我们都是计算机器,我们会同时处理所有可用的信息,并得出相同的结论。但我们是人,因此容易目光短浅,情绪波动。当股市价格同步飙升时(这种情况经常发生),投资者仿佛被一种集体狂喜所笼罩:正如美联储前主席艾伦·德·金所说,这种狂喜源于……格林斯潘曾精辟地称之为“非理性繁荣”。²相反,当投资者的“动物精神”从贪婪转向恐惧时,他们之前狂热的泡沫可能会以惊人的速度破裂。动物形象当然是股市文化不可或缺的一部分。乐观的股票买家被称为牛市,悲观的卖家被称为熊市。如今的投资者被形容为一群电子化的羊群,前一刻还在享受着正收益带来的喜悦,下一刻就蜂拥而至,争先恐后地逃离。然而,关键在于,股市是人类心理的镜子。就像智人一样,股市也会陷入低谷,甚至可能彻底崩溃。然而,希望——或者说是失忆?——似乎总能战胜这些糟糕的经历。

Yet stock markets also have a life of their own. The future is in large measure uncertain, so our assessments of companies’ future profitability are bound to vary. If we were all calculating machines we would simultaneously process all the available information and come to the same conclusion. But we are human beings, and as such are prone to myopia and to mood swings. When stock market prices surge upwards in sync, as they often do, it is as if investors are gripped by a kind of collective euphoria: what the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan memorably called irrational exuberance.2 Conversely, when investors’ ‘animal spirits’ flip from greed to fear, the bubble of their earlier euphoria can burst with amazing suddenness. Zoological imagery is of course an integral part of stock market culture. Optimistic buyers of stocks are bulls, pessimistic sellers are bears. Investors these days are said to be an electronic herd, happily grazing on positive returns one moment, then stampeding for the farmyard gate the next. The real point, however, is that stock markets are mirrors of the human psyche. Like homo sapiens, they can become depressed. They can even suffer complete breakdowns. Yet hope – or is it amnesia? – always seems able to triumph over such bad experiences.

自股票交易诞生以来的四百年间,金融泡沫层出不穷。股价一次又一次地飙升至不可持续的高位,随后又迅速暴跌。而这一过程往往伴随着欺诈行为,不择手段的内部人士试图以牺牲懵懂的新投资者为代价来牟取暴利。这种模式如此常见,以至于我们可以将其概括为五个阶段:

In the four hundred years since shares were first bought and sold, there has been a succession of financial bubbles. Time and again, share prices have soared to unsustainable heights only to crash downwards again. Time and again, this process has been accompanied by skulduggery, as unscrupulous insiders have sought to profit at the expense of naive neophytes. So familiar is this pattern that it is possible to distil it into five stages:

  1. 替代效应:经济环境的某些变化为某些公司创造了新的盈利机会。

  2. Displacement: Some change in economic circumstances creates new and profitable opportunities for certain companies.

  3. 市场狂热或过度交易:预期利润上升导致股价快速上涨,形成一种反馈机制。

  4. Euphoria or overtrading: A feedback process sets in whereby rising expected profits lead to rapid growth in share prices.

  5. 狂热还是泡沫:轻松获得资本收益的前景吸引了首次投资者和渴望榨取他们钱财的骗子。

  6. Mania or bubble: The prospect of easy capital gains attracts first-time investors and swindlers eager to mulct them of their money.

  7. 困境:内部人士意识到预期利润不可能与目前过高的股价相符,于是开始通过出售股票来获利。

  8. Distress: The insiders discern that expected profits cannot possibly justify the now exorbitant price of the shares and begin to take profits by selling.

  9. 厌恶或信誉扫地:随着股价下跌,局外人纷纷抛售,导致泡沫彻底破裂。3

  10. Revulsion or discredit: As share prices fall, the outsiders all stampede for the exits, causing the bubble to burst altogether.3

股市泡沫还有三个反复出现的特征。首先是所谓的信息不对称。内部人士——也就是那些与泡沫公司管理层相关的人——比外部人士掌握的信息要多得多,而内部人士正想方设法让外部人士掏钱。当然,这种信息不对称在商业领域总是存在的,但在泡沫中,内部人士会利用这种不对称进行欺诈。其次是跨境资本流动的作用。当资本在各国之间自由流动时,泡沫更容易出现。经验丰富的投机者,即使身处大型金融中心,可能也不具备真正内部人士的内幕消息,但他比那些初次涉足股市的新手更有可能把握时机——在泡沫破裂前尽早买入并卖出。换句话说,在泡沫中,并非所有人都非理性;或者至少,一些狂热的投资者比其他人更理性。最后,也是最重要的一点,如果没有宽松的信贷环境,真正的泡沫就不可能出现。这就是为什么许多泡沫的起源都在于中央银行的不作为或不当行为。

Stock market bubbles have three other recurrent features. The first is the role of what is sometimes referred to as asymmetric information. Insiders – those concerned with the management of bubble companies – know much more than the outsiders, whom the insiders want to part from their money. Such asymmetries always exist in business, of course, but in a bubble the insiders exploit them fraudulently.4 The second theme is the role of cross-border capital flows. Bubbles are more likely to occur when capital flows freely from country to country. The seasoned speculator, based in a major financial centre, may lack the inside knowledge of the true insider. But he is much more likely to get his timing right – buying early and selling before the bubble bursts – than the naive first-time investor. In a bubble, in other words, not everyone is irrational; or, at least, some of the exuberant are less irrational than others. Finally, and most importantly, without easy credit creation a true bubble cannot occur. That is why so many bubbles have their origins in the sins of omission or commission of central banks.

没有什么比股市泡沫的反复出现更能说明人类难以从历史中吸取教训了。想想《商业周刊》的读者在相隔仅仅二十年的两个不同时期是如何看待这个世界的。1979年8月13日,该杂志的封面刊登了一张皱巴巴的股票证书,形状像一支折断的纸飞镖,标题是:“股票之死:通货膨胀如何摧毁股市”。读者们对这场危机的严重性毫不怀疑:

Nothing illustrates more clearly how hard human beings find it to learn from history than the repetitive history of stock market bubbles. Consider how readers of the magazine Business Week saw the world at two moments in time, separated by just twenty years. On 13 August 1979, the front cover featured a crumpled share certificate in the shape of a crashed paper dart under the headline: ‘The Death of Equities: How inflation is destroying the stock market’. Readers were left in no doubt about the magnitude of the crisis:

大众早已从股票转向收益更高、抗通胀能力更强的投资。如今,作为市场最后希望的养老基金也获准抛售股票和债券,转而投资房地产、期货、黄金甚至钻石。股票市场的消亡似乎已成定局

The masses long ago switched from stocks to investments having higher yields and more protection from inflation. Now the pension funds – the market’s last hope – have won permission to quit stocks and bonds for real estate, futures, gold, and even diamonds. The death of equities looks like an almost permanent condition.5

当天,美国历史最悠久的股票市场指数——道琼斯工业平均指数收于875点,勉强及格。与十年前的水平相比有所下降,比1973年1月1052点的峰值低了近17%。经历了长达十五年的失望之后,悲观情绪是可以理解的。然而,美国股市远未结束,反而距离现代史上最伟大的牛市之一仅几年之遥。道琼斯指数在1982年8月触底(777点)后,短短五年内上涨了两倍多,并在1987年夏季创下2700点的历史新高。1987年10月经历了一次短暂而剧烈的抛售后,该指数恢复了上涨势头。1995年以后,其上涨速度甚至加快了。1999年9月27日,道琼斯指数收于略低于10395点,这意味着美国主要公司的平均股价在短短二十年内上涨了近十二倍。当天,《商业周刊》的读者兴奋地读到:

On that day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the longest-running American stock market index, closed at 875, barely changed from its level ten years before, and nearly 17 per cent below its peak of 1052 in January 1973. Pessimism after a decade and half of disappointment was understandable. Yet, far from expiring, US equities were just a few years away from one of the great bull runs of modern times. Having touched bottom in August 1982 (777), the Dow proceeded to more than treble in the space of just five years, reaching a record high of 2,700 in the summer of 1987. After a short, sharp sell-off in October 1987, the index resumed its upward rise. After 1995, the pace of its ascent even quickened. On 27 September 1999, it closed at just under 10,395, meaning that the average price of a major US corporation had risen nearly twelve-fold in just twenty years. On that day, readers of Business Week read with excitement that:

詹姆斯·K·格拉斯曼和凯文·A·哈塞特在《道琼斯指数36000点:从即将到来的股市上涨中获利的新策略》一书中指出,市场状况无需大幅改善即可支撑道琼斯指数达到36000点。他们认为,市场目前已具备36000点的实力,并且随着投资者逐渐认同这一观点,未来3到5年内股价将朝着这个目标稳步迈进……即使市盈率高达30倍*,目前的市场也极具吸引力。据他们估计,市场“完全合理的价格”应该是市盈率的100倍。 6

Conditions don’t have to get a lot better to justify Dow 36,000, say James K. Glassman and Kevin A. Hassett in Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market. They argue that the market already merits 36K, and that stock prices will advance toward that target over the next 3 to 5 years as investors come to that conclusion, too . . . The market – even at a price-to-earnings ratio of 30* – is a steal. By their estimates, a ‘perfectly reasonable price’ for the market . . . is 100 times earnings.6

这篇文章发表于互联网泡沫破裂前不到四个月,而这场泡沫正是建立在对科技公司未来盈利的过高预期之上的。到2002年10月,道琼斯指数跌至7286点,这是自1997年末以来的最低水平。截至本文撰写之时(2008年4月),道琼斯指数的交易价格仍只有格拉斯曼和哈塞特预测水平的三分之一。

This article was published less than four months before the collapse of the dot-com bubble, which had been based on exaggerated expectations about the future earnings of technology companies. By October 2002 the Dow was down to 7,286, a level not seen since late 1997. At the time of writing (April 2008), it is still trading at one third of the level Glassman and Hassett predicted.

衡量美国股市表现的最佳方法或许是将股票总回报率(假设所有股息都进行再投资)与其他金融资产(例如政府债券和商业票据或国库券)的总回报率进行比较。其中,商业票据或国库券可以作为任何短期工具(例如货币市场基金或银行活期存款)的代表。起始年份1964年是作者的出生年份。显而易见,如果我的父母当时能够投资哪怕是一笔数额不大的资金到美国股市,并持续将每年获得的股息进行再投资,那么到2007年,他们的初始投资将增长近70倍。例如,1万美元将变成70万美元。相比之下,债券或国库券等其他投资方式的表现则逊色不少。美国债券基金的增幅不到23倍。仅12倍的美元票据组合就足以弥补资金缺口。毋庸置疑,这些数字必须向下调整,以反映生活成本的上涨——在我有生之年,生活成本已经上涨了近7倍。按实际价值计算,股票上涨了10.3倍;债券上涨了3.4倍;票据上涨了1.8倍。如果我的父母在1964年犯了同样的错误,直接购买了1万美元的美元现金,那么他们儿子这笔积蓄的实际价值将缩水85%。

The performance of the American stock market is perhaps best measured by comparing the total returns on stocks, assuming the reinvestment of all dividends, with the total returns on other financial assets such as government bonds and commercial or Treasury bills, the last of which can be taken as a proxy for any short-term instrument like a money market fund or a demand deposit at a bank. The start date, 1964, is the year of the author’s birth. It will immediately be apparent that if my parents had been able to invest even a modest sum in the US stock market at that date, and to continue reinvesting the dividends they earned each year, they would have been able to increase their initial investment by a factor of nearly seventy by 2007. For example, $10,000 would have become $700,000. The alternatives of bonds or bills would have done less well. A US bond fund would have gone up by a factor of under 23; a portfolio of bills by a factor of just 12. Needless to say, such figures must be adjusted downwards to take account of the cost of living, which has risen by a factor of nearly seven in my lifetime. In real terms, stocks increased by a factor of 10.3; bonds by a factor of 3.4; bills by a factor of 1.8. Had my parents made the mistake of simply buying $10,000 in dollar bills in 1964, the real value of their son’s nest egg would have declined in real terms by 85 per cent.

从长期来看,没有哪个股市的表现能超过美国股市。一项对长期实际股市回报率的估算显示,从20世纪20年代到90年代,美国股市的平均年回报率为4.73%。瑞典紧随其后(3.71%),瑞士位列第三(3.03%),英国勉强挤进前十,回报率仅为2.28%。在所研究的27个市场中,有6个市场至少经历过一次重大中断,通常是战争或革命造成的。10个市场的长期实际回报率为负,其中最差的是委内瑞拉、秘鲁、哥伦比亚,而阿根廷则垫底(-5.36%)。7 “长期投资股票”远非普适的灵丹妙药。8然而,在大多数有长期数据可查的国家,股票的表现确实优于债券——在20世纪,股票的表现大约是债券的五倍。9可以这几乎不会让我们感到惊讶。正如我们在第二章中看到的,债券只不过是政府承诺在特定时期内支付利息并最终偿还本金。许多政府要么违约,要么货币贬值,都未能履行这些承诺。相比之下,股票是盈利性公司资本的一部分。如果公司经营成功,不仅会有股息,而且很有可能实现资本增值。当然,风险也存在。股票收益比债券和短期票据的收益更难以预测,波动性也更大。普通公司破产倒闭的概率远高于主权国家消亡的概率。如果公司破产,债券和其他债务的持有者会首先得到偿付;而股票持有者最终可能一无所获。正因如此,经济学家认为股票的更高收益体现了“股权风险溢价”——尽管在某些情况下,这种风险显然是值得承担的。

No stock market has out-performed the American over the long run. One estimate of long-term real stock market returns showed an average return for the US market of 4.73 per cent per year between the 1920s and the 1990s. Sweden came next (3.71), followed by Switzerland (3.03), with Britain barely in the top ten on 2.28 per cent. Six out of the twenty-seven markets studied suffered at least one major interruption, usually as a result of war or revolution. Ten markets suffered negative long-term real returns, of which the worst were Venezuela, Peru, Colombia and, at the very bottom, Argentina (−5.36 per cent).7 ‘Stocks for the long run’ is very far from being a universally applicable nostrum.8 It nevertheless remains true that, in most countries for which long-run data are available, stocks have out-performed bonds – by a factor of roughly five over the twentieth century.9 This can scarcely surprise us. Bonds, as we saw in Chapter 2, are no more than promises by governments to pay interest and ultimately repay principal over a specified period of time. Either through default or through currency depreciation, many governments have failed to honour those promises. By contrast, a share is a portion of the capital of a profit-making corporation. If the company succeeds in its undertakings, there will not only be dividends, but also a significant probability of capital appreciation. There are of course risks, too. The returns on stocks are less predictable and more volatile than the returns on bonds and bills. There is a significantly higher probability that the average corporation will go bankrupt and cease to exist than that the average sovereign state will disappear. In the event of a corporate bankruptcy, the holders of bonds and other forms of debt will be satisfied first; the equity holders may end up with nothing. For these reasons, economists see the superior returns on stocks as capturing an ‘equity risk premium’ – though clearly in some cases this has been a risk well worth taking.

你所交往的人

The Company You Keep

在威尼斯圣莫伊塞教堂华丽的巴洛克式立面背后,就在每年成千上万参观教堂的游客的脚下,有一段引人注目但鲜为人知的铭文:

Behind the ornate baroque façade of Venice’s San Moise church, literally under the feet of the tens of thousands of tourists who visit the church each year, there is a remarkable but seldom noticed inscription:

荣誉和纪念乔安妮斯·法爱丁堡雷吉·加利亚鲁姆·埃拉里·普雷夫蒂·克拉里西玛

HONORI ET MEMORIAL JOANNIS LAW EDINBURGENSES REGII GALLIARUM AERARII PREFECTI CLARISSIMA

“谨以此纪念爱丁堡的约翰·劳,他曾是法国国王最杰出的财政大臣。”对于这位制造了股市泡沫的人来说,这的确是一个不太寻常的安息之地。

‘To the honour and memory of John Law of Edinburgh. Most distinguished controller of the treasury of the kings of the French.’ It is a rather unlikely resting place for the man who invented the stock market bubble.

约翰·劳是一位雄心勃勃的苏格兰人,他曾是杀人犯,嗜赌成性,同时也是一位有缺陷的金融天才。他不仅造成了资产价格的第一次真正繁荣与萧条,而且……可以说,他间接引发了法国大革命,因为他彻底葬送了旧制度君主制改革财政的最佳机会。他的故事是金融史上最令人震惊却又最鲜为人知的冒险故事之一。同时,这个故事也与我们这个时代息息相关。

An ambitious Scot, a convicted murderer, a compulsive gambler and a flawed financial genius, John Law was not only responsible for the first true boom and bust in asset prices. He also may be said to have caused, indirectly, the French Revolution by comprehensively blowing the best chance that the ancien régime monarchy had to reform its finances. His story is one of the most astonishing yet least well understood tales of adventure in all financial history. It is also very much a story for our times.

劳于1671年出生于爱丁堡,父亲是一位成功的金匠,也是俯瞰福斯湾的劳里斯顿城堡的继承人。1692年,他前往伦敦,但很快就开始挥霍家产,沉迷于各种商业活动和赌博。两年后,他与邻居决斗,邻居不满与放荡不羁的劳及其情妇共用一栋房子,最终劳杀死了邻居。他因决斗罪受审并被判处死刑,但越狱逃往阿姆斯特丹。

Born in Edinburgh in 1671, Law was the son of a successful goldsmith and the heir to Lauriston Castle, overlooking the Firth of Forth. He went to London in 1692, but quickly began to fritter away his patrimony in a variety of business ventures and gambling escapades. Two years later he fought a duel with his neighbour, who objected to sharing the same building as the dissolute Law and his mistress, and killed him. He was tried for duelling and sentenced to death, but escaped from prison and fled to Amsterdam.

法律不可能找到比阿姆斯特丹更适合隐居的城市了。到了17世纪90年代,阿姆斯特丹已成为世界金融创新之都。正如我们在前一章中看到的,为了筹集资金在16世纪末对抗西班牙的独立战争资金,荷兰人改进了意大利的公共债务体系(例如,引入了彩票贷款,允许人们将储蓄投资于政府债券,从而进行赌博)。他们还改革了货币体系,创建了堪称世界上第一家中央银行的阿姆斯特丹外汇银行(Wisselbank),通过创造一种可靠的银行货币形式解决了货币贬值的问题(参见第一章)。但或许荷兰人最伟大的发明是股份公司。

Law could not have picked a better town in which to lie low. By the 1690s Amsterdam was the world capital of financial innovation. To finance their fight for independence against Spain in the late sixteenth century, as we saw in the previous chapter, the Dutch had improved on the Italian system of public debt (introducing, among other things, lottery loans which allowed people to gamble as they invested their savings in government debt). They had also reformed their currency by creating what was arguably the world’s first central bank, the Amsterdam Exchange Bank (Wisselbank), which solved the problem of debased coinage by creating a reliable form of bank money (see Chapter 1). But perhaps the single greatest Dutch invention of all was the joint-stock company.

这家公司的故事始于劳到来之前一个世纪,其起源可以追溯到荷兰商人为从葡萄牙和西班牙手中夺取利润丰厚的亚洲香料贸易控制权而做出的努力。欧洲人渴望肉桂、丁香、肉豆蔻皮、肉豆蔻和胡椒等香料,不仅是为了给食物增添风味,也是为了保存食物。几个世纪以来,这些商品一直沿着香料之路从亚洲陆路运往欧洲。但随着葡萄牙人发现了经好望角通往东印度群岛的海上航线,新的、极具吸引力的商业机会出现了。机遇随之而来。阿姆斯特丹历史博物馆收藏了大量描绘荷兰船只往返东印度群岛的画作。其中一幅早期作品的题词写道:“四艘船扬帆前往万丹取香料,并设立了贸易站。满载而归……阿姆斯特丹。1598年5月1日启航,1599年7月19日返回。” 然而,正如题词所示,往返航程十分漫长(实际上,14个月远低于平均水平)。而且,航程也充满危险:1598年启航的22艘船中,只有12艘安全返回。正因如此,商人们决定联合起来,共同筹集资金。到1600年,大约有六家新兴的东印度公司在荷兰的主要港口开展业务。然而,每家公司的运营期限都是事先设定的——通常是航程的预期时长——期满后,投资者的资金将被偿还。10这种商业模式不足以建立永久基地和防御工事,而这些显然是取代葡萄牙及其西班牙盟友*所必需的。因此,出于战略考量和利润动机,荷兰联合省议会(荷兰三级会议)提议将现有公司合并为一个单一实体。其结果是成立了联合东印度公司——荷兰特许东印度公司( Vereenigde Nederlandsche Geoctroyeerde Oostindische Compagnie,简称VOC),该公司于1602年正式获得特许,享有好望角以东、麦哲伦海峡以西所有荷兰贸易的垄断权。11

The story of the company had begun a century before Law’s arrival and had its origins in the efforts of Dutch merchants to wrest control of the lucrative Asian spice trade from Portugal and Spain. Europeans craved spices like cinnamon, cloves, mace, nutmeg and pepper not merely to flavour their food but also to preserve it. For centuries, these commodities had come overland from Asia to Europe along the Spice Road. But with the Portuguese discovery of the sea route to the East Indies via the Cape of Good Hope, new and irresistibly attractive business opportunities opened up. The Amsterdam Historical Museum is full of paintings that depict Dutch ships en route to and from the East Indies. One early example of the genre bears the inscription: ‘Four ships sailed to go and get the spices towards Bantam and also established trading posts. And came back richly laden to . . . Amsterdam. Departed May 1, 1598. Returned July 19, 1599.’ As that suggests, however, the round trip was a very long one (fourteen months was in fact well below the average). It was also hazardous: of twenty-two ships that set sail in 1598, only a dozen returned safely. For these reasons, it made sense for merchants to pool their resources. By 1600 there were around six fledgling East India companies operating out of the major Dutch ports. However, in each case the entities had a limited term that was specified in advance – usually the expected duration of a voyage – after which the capital was repaid to investors.10 This business model could not suffice to build the permanent bases and fortifications that were clearly necessary if the Portuguese and their Spanish allies* were to be supplanted. Actuated as much by strategic calculations as by the profit motive, the Dutch States-General, the parliament of the United Provinces, therefore proposed to merge the existing companies into a single entity. The result was the United East India Company – the Vereenigde Nederlandsche Geoctroyeerde Oostindische Compagnie (United Dutch Chartered East India Company, or VOC for short), formally chartered in 1602 to enjoy a monopoly on all Dutch trade east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits of Magellan.11

荷兰东印度公司的结构在许多方面都独具创新。诚然,与之前的东印度公司一样,它也被设定为一个固定的存续期,即21年;事实上,其章程第七条规定,投资者有权在10年后,即首次编制总账时,提取其投资。但这家企业的规模却是前所未有的。所有居民都可以认购该公司的资本。荷兰东印度公司(VOC)的成立源于荷兰联合省,其章程并未对筹款金额设定上限。商人、工匠甚至仆人都争相认购股份;仅在阿姆斯特丹就有1143名认购者,其中只有80人投资超过1万荷兰盾,445人投资不足1000荷兰盾。筹集到的资金高达645万荷兰盾,使VOC成为当时规模最大的公司。相比之下,其英国竞争对手——东印度公司——成立于两年前,资本仅为68373英镑(约合82万荷兰盾),由区区219名认购者共同持有。由于VOC是一家政府扶持的企业,因此竭尽全力消除各省之间的竞争(尤其是最富裕的荷兰省与泽兰省之间的竞争)。公司资本被分配给六个地区商会(阿姆斯特丹、泽兰、恩克赫伊曾、代尔夫特、霍恩和鹿特丹),尽管分配并不均等。七十位董事(bewindhebbers)也分别由这六个商会组成,他们都是重要的投资者。董事的职责之一是任命十七人组成“十七位领主”( Heeren XVII),类似于公司董事会。尽管阿姆斯特丹的资本占荷兰东印度公司总资本的57.4%,但它只提名了十七位领主中的八位。创始董事之一是迪尔克·巴斯(Dirck Bas),一位以盈利为目的的家族掌门人,从他的画像来看,他丝毫不为自己的财富感到羞愧。 13

The structure of the VOC was novel in a number of respects. True, like its predecessors, it was supposed to last for a fixed period, in this case twenty-one years; indeed, Article 7 of its charter stated that investors would be entitled to withdraw their money at the end of just ten years, when the first general balance was drawn up. But the scale of the enterprise was unprecedented. Subscription to the Company’s capital was open to all residents of the United Provinces and the charter set no upper limit on how much might be raised. Merchants, artisans and even servants rushed to acquire shares; in Amsterdam alone there were 1,143 subscribers, only eighty of whom invested more than 10,000 guilders, and 445 of whom invested less than 1,000. The amount raised, 6.45 million guilders, made the VOC much the biggest corporation of the era. The capital of its English rival, the East India Company, founded two years earlier, was just £68,373 – around 820,000 guilders – shared between a mere 219 subscribers.12 Because the VOC was a government-sponsored enterprise, every effort was made to overcome the rivalry between the different provinces (and particularly between Holland, the richest province, and Zeeland). The capital of the Company was divided (albeit unequally) between six regional chambers (Amsterdam, Zeeland, Enkhuizen, Delft, Hoorn and Rotterdam). The seventy directors (bewindhebbers), who were each substantial investors, were also distributed between these chambers. One of their roles was to appoint seventeen people to act as the Heeren XVII – the Seventeen Lords – as a kind of company board. Although Amsterdam accounted for 57.4 per cent of the VOC’s total capital, it nominated only eight out of the Seventeen Lords. Among the founding directors was Dirck Bas, a profit-oriented paterfamilias who (to judge by his portrait) was far from embarrassed by his riches.13

因此,公司的所有权被分割成多个股份( partijenactien),字面意思是“行动”(如同“行动的一部分”)。股份的款项分期支付,分别在1603年、1605年、1606年和1607年到期。所发行的证书并非现代意义上的股票证书,更像是收据;法律上的关键文件是东印度公司(VOC)的股票登记簿,所有股东的姓名在购买时都会被登记在册。 14有限责任原则是隐含的:如果公司破产,股东只会损失其在公司中的投资,而不会损失其他资产。 15另一方面,收益没有保证;东印度公司章程第17条仅规定,一旦利润达到初始资本的5%,就会向股东支付款项。

Ownership of the Company was thus divided into multiple partijen or actien, literally actions (as in ‘a piece of the action’). Payment for the shares was in instalments, due in 1603, 1605, 1606 and 1607. The certificates issued were not quite share certificates in the modern sense, but more like receipts; the key document in law was the VOC stock ledger, where all stockholders’ names were entered at the time of purchase.14 The principle of limited liability was implied: shareholders stood to lose only their investment in the company and no other assets in the event that it failed.15 There was, on the other hand, no guarantee of returns; Article 17 of the VOC charter merely stated that a payment would be made to shareholders as soon as profits equivalent to 5 per cent of the initial capital had been made.

最古老的股份:荷兰东印度公司第 6 号股份(严格来说不是股票证书,而是部分支付股份的收据,由阿姆斯特丹议会于 1606 年 9 月 27 日签发,并由 Arent ten Grotenhuys 和 Dirck van Os 签署)。

The oldest share: share no. 6 of the Dutch East India Company (not strictly speaking a share certificate but a receipt for part payment of share, issued by the Camere Amsterdam on 27 September 1606, and signed by Arent ten Grotenhuys and Dirck van Os)

事实上,荷兰东印度公司(VOC)并非一开始就取得了商业上的成功。它需要建立贸易网络、确立运营模式并建立安全的基地。1603年至1607年间,共计22艘船只完成装备并被派往亚洲,耗资近370万荷兰盾。最初的目标是建立一系列工厂(硝石精炼厂、纺织厂和仓库),其产品随后将用于交换香料。早期对抗葡萄牙的胜利使其在孟加拉湾的马苏利帕特南和摩鹿加群岛的安汶(今安汶)建立了据点,但在1606年,马特利夫海军上将未能攻占马来半岛的马六甲,而对摩鹿加群岛另一座岛屿马基安的进攻也被西班牙舰队成功击退。在盛产肉豆蔻的班达群岛中最大的岛屿班达内拉岛上修建堡垒的尝试也以失败告终。16到1608年与西班牙签署为期十二年的停战协定时,荷兰东印度公司从俘获敌方船只中获得的收入已经超过了贸易收入。17其中一位主要投资者是门诺派教徒彼得·林特延斯对公司的好战行为深感失望,于1605年退出公司。另一位早期董事艾萨克·勒梅尔则因不满公司事务管理不善而辞职。18

The VOC was not in fact an immediate commercial success. Trade networks had to be set up, the mode of operation established and secure bases established. Between 1603 and 1607, a total of twenty-two ships were fitted out and sent to Asia, at a cost of just under 3.7 million guilders. The initial aim was to establish a number of factories (saltpetre refineries, textile facilities and warehouses), the produce of which would then be exchanged for spices. Early successes against the Portuguese saw footholds established at Masulipatnam in the Bay of Bengal and Amboyna (today Ambon) in the Moluccas (Malukus), but in 1606 Admiral Matelief failed to capture Malacca (Melaka) on the Malay Peninsula and an attack on Makian (another Moluccan island) was successfully repulsed by a Spanish fleet. An attempt to build a fort on Banda Neira, the biggest of the nutmeg-producing Banda islands, also failed.16 By the time a twelve-year truce was signed with Spain in 1608, the VOC had made more money from capturing enemy vessels than from trade.17 One major investor, the Mennonite Pieter Lijntjens, was so dismayed by the Company’s warlike conduct that he withdrew from the Company in 1605. Another early director, Isaac le Maire, resigned in protest at what he regarded as the mismanagement of the Company’s affairs.18

但即使是大股东又能有多少权力呢?微乎其微。1612年,公司董事向政府请愿,要求免除公布十年账目的义务——投资者本应在这一年选择赎回本金——政府批准了他们的请求,账目的公布和投资者本金的偿还都被推迟了。对股东的唯一补偿是,1610年,十七位贵族同意在次年支付股息,但当时公司资金极度匮乏,股息只能以香料支付。1612年,公司宣布不会像原计划那样进行清算。这意味着任何想要取回本金的股东都别无选择,只能将股份出售给其他投资者

But how much power did even large shareholders have? Little. When the Company’s directors petitioned the government to be released from their obligation to publish ten-year accounts in 1612 – the date when investors were supposed to be able to withdraw their capital if they chose to – permission was granted and publication of the accounts and the repayment of investors’ capital were both postponed. The only sop to shareholders was that in 1610 the Seventeen Lords agreed to make a dividend payment the following year, though at this stage the Company was so strapped for cash that the dividend had to be paid in spices. In 1612 it was announced that the VOC would not be liquidated, as originally planned. This meant that any shareholders who wanted their cash back had no alternative but to sell their shares to another investor.19

股份公司和股票市场就这样在短短几年内相继诞生。第一家上市的股份有限公司及其首次公开募股(IPO)一经推出,二级市场便应运而生,允许这些股票进行买卖。事实证明,这是一个流动性极强的市场。东印度公司(VOC)的股票周转率很高:到1607年,该公司三分之一的股票已从原股东手中转让。此外,由于该公司账簿的公开频率较低——购买行为按月或按季度正式登记——印度公司股票的远期市场很快发展起来,允许进行未来交割的买卖。起初,此类交易是在非正式的露天市场进行的,例如瓦尔莫斯街(Warmoesstraat)或老教堂(Oude Kerk)附近。但东印度公司股票市场如此活跃,以至于在1608年决定在罗金街(Rokin)上建造一座室内证券交易所(Beurs),距离市政厅不远。这座拥有四合院、柱廊和钟楼的交易所,是东印度公司历史上第一个重要的证券交易所。世界各地的证券交易所看起来就像中世纪的牛津学院。但每个工作日中午到下午两点之间,那里发生的事情却具有革命性的意义。一位同时代的人这样描述交易大厅在典型交易时段结束时的气氛:“握手之后是叫喊、辱骂、无礼、推搡。”多头(liefhebbers )与空头( contremines )展开激烈的搏斗。焦虑的投机者“咬指甲、拔手指、闭眼、走四步自言自语四次、抬手捂脸颊,仿佛牙疼一般,同时还伴有莫名其妙的咳嗽”。 21

The joint-stock company and the stock market were thus born within just a few years of each other. No sooner had the first publicly owned corporation come into existence with the first-ever initial public offering of shares, than a secondary market sprang up to allow these shares to be bought and sold. It proved to be a remarkably liquid market. Turnover in VOC shares was high: by 1607 fully one third of the Company’s stock had been transferred from the original owners.20 Moreover, because the Company’s books were opened rather infrequently – purchases were formally registered monthly or quarterly – a lively forward market in VOC shares soon developed, which allowed sales for future delivery. To begin with, such transactions were done in informal open-air markets, on the Warmoesstraat or next to the Oude Kerk. But so lively was the market for VOC stock that in 1608 it was decided to build a covered Beurs on the Rokin, not far from the town hall. With its quadrangle, its colonnades and its clock tower, this first stock exchange in the world looked for all the world like a medieval Oxford college. But what went on there between noon and two o’clock each workday was recognizably revolutionary. One contemporary captured the atmosphere on the trading floor as a typical session drew to a close: ‘Handshakes are followed by shouting, insults, impudence, pushing and shoving.’ Bulls (liefhebbers) did battle with bears (contremines). The anxious speculator ‘chews his nails, pulls his fingers, closes his eyes, takes four paces and four times talks to himself, raises his hand to his cheek as if he has a toothache and all this accompanied by a mysterious coughing’.21

阿姆斯特丹交易所银行的成立(1609年)也恰逢同一时期,这并非巧合,因为没有有效的货币体系,股票市场就难以有效运作。一旦荷兰银行家开始接受东印度公司(VOC)的股票作为贷款抵押品,股票市场与信贷供应之间的联系便开始形成。下一步是银行放贷,以便人们可以用信贷购买股票。公司、交易所和银行构成了新型经济的三角基础。

Nor was it coincidental that this same period saw the foundation (in 1609) of the Amsterdam Exchange Bank, since a stock market cannot readily function without an effective monetary system. Once Dutch bankers started to accept VOC shares as collateral for loans, the link between the stock market and the supply of credit began to be forged. The next step was for banks to lend money so that shares might be purchased with credit. Company, bourse and bank provided the triangular foundation for a new kind of economy.

一度,以心怀不满的前董事勒梅尔为首的东印度公司批评者似乎打算利用这个新兴市场向公司董事施压。他们试图通过在新兴期货市场做空来压低东印度公司股价,但1611年的股息支付挫败了他们的企图,勒梅尔及其同伙因此破产。22 1612年、1613年和1618年又支付了现金股息。23然而公司的批评者(“异议投资者”或多兰顿人)仍然不满。在1622年出版的一篇题为《必要的论述》 (Nootwendich Discours)的小册子中,一位匿名作者哀叹某些董事“自私自利的管理”缺乏透明度,他们确保“一切都笼罩在黑暗之中”:“我们只能推测,账簿一定是抹了培根,然后喂了狗。” 24持不同意见者认为,董事任期应该固定,所有主要股东都应该有权任命董事。

For a time it seemed as if the VOC’s critics, led by the disgruntled ex-director le Maire, might exploit this new market to put pressure on the Company’s directors. A concerted effort to drive down the price of VOC shares by short selling on the nascent futures market was checked by the 1611 dividend payment, ruining le Maire and his associates.22 Further cash dividends were paid in 1612, 1613 and 1618.23 The Company’s critics (the ‘dissenting investors’ or Doleanten) remained dissatisfied, however. In a tract entitled The Necessary Discourse (Nootwendich Discours), published in 1622, an anonymous author lamented the lack of transparency which characterized the ‘self-serving governance of certain of the directors’, who were ensuring that ‘all remained darkness’: ‘The account book, we can only surmise, must have been rubbed with bacon and fed to the dogs.’24 Directorships should be for fixed terms, the dissenters argued, and all major shareholders should have the right to appoint a director.

这场旨在改革如今被称为荷兰东印度公司(VOC)公司治理的运动最终取得了成果。1622年12月,公司章程续签时,进行了实质性修改。董事不再终身任职,而是每次任期仅为三年。“主要参与者”(持有与董事同等股权的股东)从此有权从自身中提名“九人”,十七位大臣有义务就“重大事项”咨询这九人的意见。这九人有权监督六个分院的年度账目,并与十七位大臣共同提名未来的董事候选人。此外,1623年3月,各方达成一致,这九人有权列席(但无投票权)十七位大臣的会议,并审查年度采购账目。主要参与者还被授权任命审计员(rekening-opnemers)来审核提交给荷兰议会的账目。1632年,一项将股息标准设定为12.5%的决定进一步安抚了股东,这一比例是公司借款利率的两倍。*这项政策的结果是,此后公司几乎所有的净利润都分配给了股东。26股东的权益也得到了有效保障,免于被稀释。令人惊讶的是,在荷兰东印度公司存在的整个时期,其资本基础基本保持不变。27需要资本支出时,荷兰东印度公司并非通过发行新股来筹集资金,而是通过发行债券来筹集资金。事实上,到17世纪70年代,公司的信用状况非常好,以至于它能够作为中间人,促成荷兰和泽兰两省政府提供的200万荷兰盾贷款。

The campaign for a reform of what would now be called the VOC’s corporate governance duly bore fruit. In December 1622, when the Company’s charter was renewed, it was substantially modified. Directors would no longer be appointed for life but could serve for only three years at a time. The ‘chief participants’ (shareholders with as much equity as directors) were henceforth entitled to nominate ‘Nine Men’ from among themselves, whom the Seventeen Lords were obliged to consult on ‘great and important matters’, and who would be entitled to oversee the annual accounting of the six chambers and to nominate, jointly with the Seventeen Lords, future candidates for directorships. In addition, in March 1623, it was agreed that the Nine Men would be entitled to attend (but not to vote at) the meetings of the Seventeen Lords and to scrutinize the annual purchasing accounts. The chief participants were also empowered to appoint auditors (rekening-opnemers) to check the accounts submitted to the States-General.25 Shareholders were further mollified by the decision, in 1632, to set a standard 12.5 per cent dividend, twice the rate at which the Company was able to borrow money.* The result of this policy was that virtually all of the Company’s net profits thereafter were distributed to the shareholders.26 Shareholders were also effectively guaranteed against dilution of their equity. Amazingly, the capital base remained essentially unchanged throughout the VOC’s existence.27 When capital expenditures were called for, the VOC raised money not by issuing new shares but by issuing debt in the form of bonds. Indeed, so good was the Company’s credit by the 1670s that it was able to act as an intermediary for a two-million-guilder loan by the States of Holland and Zeeland.

当然,如果荷兰东印度公司在十七世纪中期没有实现盈利,所有这些安排都无法持续。这在很大程度上要归功于扬·彼得松·科恩,这位好战的年轻人……科恩对商业与胁迫之间的关系毫不含糊。正如他自己所说:“没有贸易,我们就无法发动战争;没有战争,我们也无法进行贸易。” 28他对待竞争对手毫不留情,在安汶处决了英国东印度公司的官员,并有效地消灭了班达群岛的土著居民。科恩天生就是一个帝国缔造者,1619年5月,他控制了爪哇岛的小港口雅加达,将其更名为巴达维亚,并在年仅30岁时,顺利成为荷属东印度群岛的首任总督。他和他的继任者安东尼·范·迪门系统性地扩张了荷兰在该地区的势力,将英国人逐出班达群岛,将西班牙人逐出特尔纳特和蒂多雷,将葡萄牙人逐出马六甲。到1657年,荷兰人控制了锡兰(斯里兰卡)的大部分地区;在接下来的十年里,他们的势力进一步沿着次大陆的马拉巴尔海岸扩张,并进入了苏拉威西岛。科罗曼德尔海岸也曾是繁荣的荷兰基地。29火力与对外贸易在巴达维亚号等船只上并驾齐驱——如今在荷兰海岸的莱利斯塔德可以看到它的精美复制品。

None of these arrangements would have been sustainable, of course, if the VOC had not become profitable in the mid-seventeenth century. This was in substantial measure the achievement of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, a bellicose young man who had no illusions about the relationship between commerce and coercion. As Coen himself put it: ‘We cannot make war without trade, nor trade without war.’28 He was ruthless in his treatment of competitors, executing British East India Company officials at Amboyna and effectively wiping out the indigenous Bandanese. A natural-born empire builder, Coen seized control of the small Javanese port of Jakarta in May 1619, renamed it Batavia and, aged just 30, duly became the first governor-general of the Dutch East Indies. He and his successor, Antonie van Diemen, systematically expanded Dutch power in the region, driving the British from the Banda Islands, the Spaniards from Ternate and Tidore, and the Portuguese from Malacca. By 1657 the Dutch controlled most of Ceylon (Sri Lanka); the following decade saw further expansion along the Malabar coast on the subcontinent and into the island of Celebes (Sulawesi). There were also thriving Dutch bases on the Coromandel coast.29 Fire-power and foreign trade sailed side by side on ships like the Batavia – a splendid replica of which can be seen today at Lelystad on the coast of Holland.

这种激进策略的商业回报十分丰厚。到17世纪50年代,荷兰东印度公司(VOC)已在丁香、肉豆蔻皮和肉豆蔻的出口领域建立了高效且利润丰厚的垄断地位(胡椒的产地过于分散,无法被垄断),并逐渐成为科罗曼德尔半岛印度纺织品出口的主要渠道。 30该公司同时也是亚洲内部贸易的中心,用日本的白银和铜换取印度纺织品以及中国的黄金和丝绸。反过来,印度纺织品又可以用来交换来自太平洋岛屿的胡椒和香料,这些香料又可以用来从中东购买贵金属。 31 后来,该公司还为在亚洲的其他欧洲人提供金融服务,其中就包括罗伯特·克莱夫。克莱夫通过巴达维亚和阿姆斯特丹,将他征服孟加拉所获得的巨额财富转移回了伦敦。32作为世界上第一家大型公司,VOC 能够将规模经济与降低的交易成本以及经济学家所谓的网络外部性(即多个员工和代理人之间共享信息所带来的益处)结合起来。33正如……一样与英国东印度公司相比,荷兰东印度公司面临的最大挑战是委托代理问题:其驻地人员往往自行交易、搞砸交易,甚至直接欺诈公司。然而,一种独特的薪酬体系在一定程度上缓解了这一问题,该体系将报酬与投资和销售额挂钩,优先考虑营业额而非净利润。 34业务蓬勃发展。17世纪20年代,有50艘荷兰东印度公司的船只满载货物从亚洲返回;到17世纪90年代,这一数字上升至156艘。 35 1700年至1750年间,绕过好望角返回的荷兰船只吨位翻了一番。即使到了1760年,其吨位仍然约为英国船只吨位的三倍。 36

The commercial payoffs of this aggressive strategy were substantial. By the 1650s, the VOC had established an effective and highly lucrative monopoly on the export of cloves, mace and nutmeg (the production of pepper was too widely dispersed for it to be monopolized) and was becoming a major conduit for Indian textile exports from Coromandel.30 It was also acting as a hub for intra-Asian trade, exchanging Japanese silver and copper for Indian textiles and Chinese gold and silk. In turn, Indian textiles could be traded for pepper and spices from the Pacific islands, which could be used to purchase precious metals from the Middle East.31 Later, the Company provided financial services to other Europeans in Asia, not least Robert Clive, who transferred a large part of the fortune he had made from conquering Bengal back to London via Batavia and Amsterdam.32 As the world’s first big corporation, the VOC was able to combine economies of scale with reduced transaction costs and what economists call network externalities, the benefit of pooling information between multiple employees and agents.33 As was true of the English East India Company, the VOC’s biggest challenge was the principal–agent problem: the tendency of its men on the spot to trade on their own account, bungle transactions or simply defraud the company. This, however, was partially countered by an unusual compensation system, which linked remuneration to investments and sales, putting a priority on turnover rather than net profits.34 Business boomed. In the 1620s, fifty VOC ships had returned from Asia laden with goods; by the 1690s the number was 156.35 Between 1700 and 1750 the tonnage of Dutch shipping sailing back around the Cape doubled. As late as 1760 it was still roughly three times the amount of British shipping.36

荷兰东印度公司(VOC)的经济和政治崛起可以从其股价走势中看出。阿姆斯特丹股市的确波动剧烈,投资者对战争、和平以及海难的传言反应不一,塞法迪犹太人约瑟夫·彭索·德·拉·维加在其著作《混乱之混乱》( Confusión de Confusiones,1688年)中对此进行了生动的描述。然而,在公司成立后的一个多世纪里,其股价的长期趋势明显向上。1602年至1733年间,VOC的股价从面值(100)飙升至历史最高点786,尽管从1652年到1688年光荣革命期间,该公司一直受到好战的英国公司的挑战。37这种持续的资本增值,加上定期分红和稳定的消费价格,*确保了像迪尔克·巴斯这样的主要股东积累了巨额财富。早在1650年,股息总额就已达到原始投资额的八倍,这意味着年化收益率高达27%。 38然而,引人注目的是,荷兰东印度公司从未出现过所谓的泡沫。与1636-1637年的荷兰郁金香期货泡沫不同,VOC(荷兰东印度公司)股价的上涨是渐进的,持续时间更长。超过一个世纪的时间里,尽管其股价下跌速度更快,但到1794年12月跌至120英镑时,仍然用了六十多年。这种涨跌与荷兰帝国的兴衰密切相关。其他一些表面上与荷兰东印度公司类似的垄断贸易公司的股价走势则截然不同,短短几个月内便经历了暴涨暴跌。要理解个中缘由,我们必须再次回到约翰·劳的视角。

The economic and political ascent of the VOC can be traced in its share price. The Amsterdam stock market was certainly volatile, as investors reacted to rumours of war, peace and shipwrecks in a way vividly described by the Sephardic Jew Joseph Penso de la Vega in his aptly named book Confusión de Confusiones (1688). Yet the long-term trend was clearly upward for more than a century after the Company’s foundation. Between 1602 and 1733, VOC stock rose from par (100) to an all-time peak of 786, this despite the fact that from 1652 until the Glorious Revolution of 1688 the Company was being challenged by bellicose British competition.37 Such sustained capital appreciation, combined with the regular dividends and stable consumer prices,* ensured that major shareholders like Dirck Bas became very wealthy indeed. As early as 1650, total dividend payments were already eight times the original investment, implying an annual rate of return of 27 per cent.38 The striking point, however, is that there was never such a thing as a Dutch East India Company bubble. Unlike the Dutch tulip futures bubble of 1636–7, the ascent of the VOC stock price was gradual, spread over more than a century, and, though its descent was more rapid, it still took more than sixty years to fall back down to 120 in December 1794. This rise and fall closely tracked the rise and fall of the Dutch Empire. The prices of shares in other monopoly trading companies, outwardly similar to the VOC, would behave very differently, soaring and slumping in the space of just a few months. To understand why, we must rejoin John Law.


对于这位特立独行的苏格兰人来说,荷兰金融简直是一次全新的体验。劳对东印度公司、外汇银行和证券交易所之间的关系着迷不已。他一向嗜赌成性,却发现阿姆斯特丹证券交易所比任何赌场都更令人兴奋。他惊叹于卖空者的种种伎俩,他们散布负面谣言,试图压低荷兰东印度公司的股价;也惊叹于那些从事空头头寸交易的专家,他们投机性地买卖自己根本不持有的股票。金融创新层出不穷。劳本人甚至提出了一项巧妙的方案,为荷兰国家彩票的持有者提供保险,以防他们空手而归。

To the renegade Scotsman, Dutch finance came as a revelation. Law was fascinated by the relationships between the East India Company, the Exchange Bank and the stock exchange. Always attracted by gambling, Law found the Amsterdam Beurs more exciting than any casino. He marvelled at the antics of short-sellers, who spread negative rumours to try to drive down VOC share prices, or the specialists in windhandel, who traded speculatively in shares they did not themselves even own. Financial innovation was all around. Law himself floated an ingenious scheme to insure holders of Dutch national lottery tickets against drawing blanks.

然而,劳认为荷兰的金融体系并不完善。首先,限制东印度公司股票的数量,在市场如此追捧的情况下,似乎显得不合时宜。其次,阿姆斯特丹交易所银行的保守作风也令劳感到困惑。该银行发行的“银行货币”虽然取得了成功,但其形式主要体现在银行账簿上的一列列数字上。除了向在银行存入硬币的商人开具的收据外,这些货币并无实物存在。劳心中已萌生了一个想法:对这些机构进行一次惊天动地的改革,使其融合垄断贸易公司和发行纸币的公共银行(类似于英格兰银行)的特性。劳很快就渴望在一个毫无防备的国家试行这套全新的金融体系。但究竟该选择哪个国家呢?

Yet the Dutch financial system struck Law as not quite complete. For one thing, it seemed wrong-headed to restrict the number of East India Company shares when the market was so enamoured of them. Law was also puzzled by the conservatism of the Amsterdam Exchange Bank. Its own ‘bank money’ had proved a success, but it largely took the form of columns of figures in the bank’s ledgers. Apart from receipts issued to merchants who deposited coin with the bank, the money had no physical existence. The idea was already taking shape in Law’s mind of a breathtaking modification of these institutions, which would combine the properties of a monopoly trading company with a public bank that issued notes in the manner of the Bank of England. Law was soon itching to try out a whole new system of finance on an unsuspecting nation. But which one?

他最初在热那亚碰碰运气,从事外汇和证券交易。之后,他又在威尼斯待了一段时间,白天做交易,晚上赌博。夜间,他还与艾莱伯爵合作,在伦敦股市建立起相当可观的投资组合。正如这所表明的,劳的人脉很广。但他的行为仍然有损名誉。班伯里伯爵的女儿凯瑟琳·诺尔斯夫人冒充他的妻子,并成为他的两个孩子的母亲,尽管她实际上已嫁给了另一个男人。1705年,他向苏格兰议会提交了一份关于建立新银行的提案,后来以《货币与贸易考量》为出版。他的核心思想是,新银行应该发行计息纸币,以取代硬币作为流通货币。该提案在苏格兰与英格兰联合法案颁布前不久被议会否决。39对故土感到失望的劳前往都灵,并于1711年觐见了萨伏依公爵维克托·阿梅迪奥二世。在他未发表的《皮埃蒙特备忘录》中,他再次为纸币辩护。劳认为,公众信用的基础在于信心;有了信心,纸币就能像硬币一样发挥作用。“我发现了炼金术士之石的秘密,”他告诉……朋友说:“这就像用纸点金。” 40公爵犹豫地说:“我还没富到会把自己毁掉的地步。”

He first tried his luck in Genoa, trading foreign currency and securities. He spent some time in Venice, trading by day, gambling by night. In partnership with the Earl of Islay, he also built up a substantial portfolio on the London stock market. (As this suggests, Law was well connected. But there remained a disreputable quality to his conduct. Lady Catherine Knowles, daughter of the Earl of Banbury, passed as his wife and was the mother of his two children, despite the fact that she was married to another man. In 1705 he submitted to the Scottish parliament a proposal for a new bank, later published as Money and Trade Considered. His central idea was that the new bank should issue interest-bearing notes that would supplant coins as currency. It was rejected by the parliament shortly before the Act of Union with England.39 Disappointed by his homeland, Law travelled to Turin and in 1711 secured an audience with Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy. In his unpublished ‘Piedmont Memorials’, he again made the case for a paper currency. According to Law, confidence alone was the basis for public credit; with confidence, banknotes would serve just as well as coins. ‘I have discovered the secret of the philosopher’s stone, he told a friend, ‘it is to make gold out of paper.’40 The Duke demurred, saying ‘I am not rich enough to ruin myself.’

第一个泡沫

The First Bubble

为什么劳在法国有机会施展他的金融魔法?毕竟,法国人早已看透了他的真面目:1708年,路易十四的外交大臣托尔西侯爵就曾指出他是一名职业赌徒,甚至可能是间谍。答案是,法国当时的财政状况极其严峻。由于路易十四时期的战争,法国政府背负了巨额公共债务,在不到一个世纪的时间里,它已濒临第三次破产。对王室现有债务进行审查(Visa)被认为是必要的,这导致许多债务被取消或减少,实际上相当于部分违约。即便如此,为了弥补当前的财政赤字,仍然需要发行2.5亿张新的计息国债(billets d'état)。而试图减少……的尝试,反而使情况雪上加霜。金银铸币数量的激增,使经济陷入衰退。41劳声称他能解决所有这些问题。

Why was it in France that Law was given the chance to try out his financial alchemy? The French knew him for what he was, after all: in 1708 the Marquis of Torcy, Louis XIV’s Foreign Minister, had identified him as a professional joueur (gambler) and possible spy. The answer is that France’s fiscal problems were especially desperate. Saddled with enormous public debt as a result of the wars of Louis XIV, the government was on the brink of its third bankruptcy in less than a century. A review (Visa) of the crown’s existing debts was thought necessary, which led to the cancellation and reduction of many of them, in effect a partial default. Even so, 250 million new interest-bearing notes called billets d’état still had to be issued to fund the current deficit. Matters were only made worse by an attempt to reduce the quantity of gold and silver coinage, which plunged the economy into recession.41 To all these problems Law claimed to have the solution.

1715年10月,劳向皇家委员会提交了第一份关于设立公共票据发行银行的提案,但由于诺阿耶公爵反对劳的大胆提议——即该银行还应兼任王室出纳,接收所有税款——该提案遭到否决。劳的第二份关于设立纯粹私人银行的提案则更为成功。1716年5月,在劳的指导下,法国通用银行(Banque Générale)正式成立。该银行获准发行以金银等贵金属支付的票据,有效期为20年。其资本设定为600万里弗尔(1200股,每股5000里弗尔),其中四分之三将以当时已略微贬值的国票(billets d'état)支付(因此实际资本接近285万里弗尔)。42起初这似乎只是一项规模不大的企业,但劳始终怀揣着一个更为宏大的计划,他决心将这个计划推销给路易十五年幼时的摄政王奥尔良公爵。1717年,他又向前迈进了一步,当时颁布法令规定所有税款均须以法国兴业银行的票据支付。这项措施最初在一些地方遭到抵制,但最终被政府有效执行。

In October 1715 Law’s first proposal for a public note-issuing bank was submitted to the royal council, but it was rejected because of the opposition of the Duke of Noailles to Law’s bold suggestion that the bank should also act as the crown’s cashier, receiving all tax payments. A second proposal for a purely private bank was more successful. The Banque Générale was established under Law’s direction in May 1716. It was licensed to issue notes payable in specie (gold or silver) for a twenty-year period. The capital was set at 6,000,000 livres (1,200 shares of 5,000 livres each), three quarters to be paid in now somewhat depreciated billets d’état (so the effective capital was closer to 2,850,000 livres).42 It seemed at first quite a modest enterprise, but Law always had a grander design in mind, which he was determined to sell to the Duke of Orleans, the Regent during the minority of Louis XV. In 1717 he took another step forward when it was decreed that Banque Générale notes should be used in payment for all taxes, a measure initially resisted in some places but effectively enforced by the government.

劳的雄心壮志在于建立一家公共银行,以重振法国的经济信心。他效仿荷兰模式,但不同之处在于,这家银行将发行纸币。随着资金流入银行,政府的巨额债务将得以整合。与此同时,纸币将重振法国贸易,进而恢复法国的经济实力。“银行并非我唯一的想法,也并非我最伟大的想法,”他告诉摄政王,“我将完成一项足以震惊欧洲的壮举,它将给法国带来翻天覆地的变化——其影响甚至超过了印度的发现……” 43

Law’s ambition was to revive economic confidence in France by establishing a public bank, on the Dutch model, but with the difference that this bank would issue paper money. As money was invested in the bank, the government’s huge debt would be consolidated. At the same time, paper money would revive French trade – and with it French economic power. ‘The bank is not the only, nor the grandest of my ideas,’ he told the Regent. ‘I will produce a work which will surprise Europe by the changes which it will effect in favour of France – changes more powerful than were produced by the discovery of the Indies . . .’43

劳曾在共和制的荷兰学习金融,但他从一开始就认为专制的法国更适合他后来被称为“金融体系”的理论。他写道:“我坚持认为,一位懂得治理国家的专制君主能够比……更有效地扩展信贷,并以更低的利率找到所需的资金。”“一位权力有限的君主。”这是一种绝对主义的财政理论,其基础是“在信贷领域,如同在军事和立法领域一样,最高权力必须只掌握在一人手中”。 44关键在于使王室信贷比过去更高效地运作,过去王室为了资助战争而勉强借贷。在劳的方案中,君主实际上会将信贷委托给“一家贸易公司,王国的所有贸易物资依次流入该公司,并最终汇聚于此”。正如他所说,整个国家将“成为一个商人团体,他们以皇家银行作为现金来源,因此所有商业、货币和商品都将重新汇聚于此”。 45

Law had studied finance in republican Holland, but from the outset he saw absolutist France as a better setting for what became known as his System. ‘I maintain’, he wrote, ‘that an absolute prince who knows how to govern can extend his credit further and find needed funds at a lower interest rate than a prince who is limited in his authority.’ This was an absolutist theory of finance, based on the assertion that ‘in credit as in military and legislative authorities, supreme power must reside in only one person’.44 The key was to make royal credit work more productively than in the past, when the crown had borrowed money in a hand-to-mouth way to finance its wars. In Law’s scheme, the monarch would effectively delegate his credit ‘to a trading company, into which all the materials of trade in the kingdom fall successively, and are amassed into one’. The whole nation would, as he put it, ‘become a body of traders, who have for cash the royal bank, in which by consequence all the commerce, money, and merchandise re-unite’.45

与荷兰的情况类似,帝国在劳的构想中扮演了关键角色。在他看来,法国在开发海外领地方面做得远远不够。因此,他提议接管法国与路易斯安那地区的贸易。路易斯安那是一片广袤无垠但完全未开发的土地,从密西西比河三角洲一直延伸到美国中西部,面积几乎相当于如今美国国土的四分之一。1717年,一家名为“西部公司”(Compagnie d'Occident)的新公司被授予路易斯安那商业的垄断权(以及对该殖民地内部事务的控制权),为期25年。该公司的资本被设定为1亿里弗尔,这在当时的法国是一笔前所未有的巨款。公司股票每股定价500里弗尔,鼓励法国人(无论等级)以及外国人使用国票(按期分期付款)购买,国票到期后将兑换成年利率4%的永久债券。劳的名字位列董事名单之首。

As in the Dutch case, empire played a key role in Law’s vision. In his view, too little was being done to develop France’s overseas possessions. He therefore proposed to take over France’s trade with the Louisiana territory, a vast but wholly undeveloped tract of land stretching from the Mississippi delta across the Midwest – equivalent to nearly a quarter of what is now the United States. In 1717 a new ‘Company of the West’ (Compagnie d’Occident) was granted the monopoly of the commerce of Louisiana (as well as the control of the colony’s internal affairs) for a period of twenty-five years. The Company’s capital was fixed at 100 million livres, an unprecedented sum in France. Shares in the Company were priced at 500 livres each, and Frenchmen, regardless of rank, as well as foreigners were encouraged to buy them (in instalments) with the billets d’état, which were to be retired and converted into 4 per cent rentes (perpetual bonds). Law’s name headed the list of directors.

的确,劳的制度最初遭到了一些抵制。圣西蒙公爵曾睿智地指出:

There was some initial resistance to Law’s System, it is true. The Duke of Saint-Simon observed wisely that:

这种制度本身或许有其优点;但它只适用于共和国或像英国那样的君主制国家,因为这些国家的财政完全由出资者掌控,而且他们只按自己的意愿出资。但在一个软弱、多变且专制的国家里,与法国一样,英国必然需要稳定;因为国王……可能会推翻银行——这种诱惑太大,同时也太容易了。46

An establishment of this sort may be good in itself; but it is only so in a republic or in a monarchy like England, whose finances are controlled by those alone who furnish them, and who only furnish as much as they please. But in a state which is weak, changeable, and absolute, like France, stability must necessarily be wanting to it; since the King . . . may overthrow the Bank – the temptation to which would be too great, and at the same time too easy.46

仿佛为了验证这一点,1718年初,巴黎高等法院对新任财政大臣勒内·达尔让松(以及劳的银行)发起猛烈抨击。起因是达尔让松下令将货币贬值40%,高等法院抱怨说,这造成了“如此巨大而又如此晦涩的混乱,以至于我们对此一无所知”。 47 与此同时,由帕里斯兄弟创立的一家竞争对手公司在吸引投资者方面比劳的西部公司更为成功。然而,摄政王以典型的专制方式,强力重申了王室的特权,这令劳欣喜不已,也让他从中获益匪浅。 (他评论道:“专制权力在一个尚未习惯它的民族中如此强烈反对的机构建立之初,其益处何其巨大!”) 48此外,从1718年末开始,政府授予西方公司一系列特权,旨在提升其股票的吸引力。8月,该公司被授予征收所有烟草收入的权利。12月,它又获得了塞内加尔公司的特权。为了进一步巩固劳的地位,法国总银行获得了皇家认可:1718年12月,它更名为皇家银行,实际上是法国第一家中央银行。为了增加其纸币的吸引力,这些纸币此后可以兑换成银行埃居(代表固定数量的白银)或更常用的图尔里弗(一种记账单位,其与黄金和白银的比率可能有所不同)。然而,7月,埃居纸币停止流通并被收回,49而1719年4月22日的一项法令规定,纸币不应像白银一样经历周期性的“贬值”。50法国从铸币向纸币的过渡由此开始。

As if to put this to the test, in early 1718 the Parlement of Paris launched fierce attacks on the new Finance Minister René D’Argenson (and on Law’s bank) following a 40 per cent debasement of the coinage ordered by the former, which had caused, the Parlement complained, ‘a chaos so great and so obscure that nothing about it can be known’.47 A rival company, set up by the Pâris brothers, was meanwhile proving more successful in attracting investors than Law’s Company of the West. In true absolutist fashion, however, the Regent forcefully reasserted the prerogatives of the crown, much to Law’s delight – and benefit. (‘How great is the benefit of a despotic power’, he observed, ‘in the beginnings of an institution subject to so much opposition on the part of a nation that has not yet become accustomed to it!’)48 Moreover, from late 1718 onwards the government granted privileges to the Company of the West that were calculated to increase the appeal of its shares. In August it was awarded the right to collect all the revenue from tobacco. In December it acquired the privileges of the Senegal Company. In a further attempt to bolster Law’s position, the Banque Générale was given the royal seal of approval: it became the Banque Royale in December 1718, in effect the first French central bank. To increase the appeal of its notes, these could henceforth be exchanged for either écus de banque (representing fixed amounts of silver) or the more commonly used livres tournois (a unit of account whose relationship to gold and silver could vary). In July, however, the écu notes were discontinued and withdrawn,49 while a decree of 22 April 1719 stipulated that banknotes should not share in the periodic ‘diminutions’ (in price) to which silver was subject.50 France’s transition from coinage to paper money had begun.

与此同时,西方公司继续扩张。1719年5月,该公司接管了东印度公司和中国公司,组建了印度公司(Compagnie des Indes),即更为人熟知的密西西比公司。7月,劳获得了皇家铸币厂的利润,为期九年。8月,他从一位竞争对手手中夺取了间接税农场的租赁权,该农场此前一年已被授予租赁权。9月,该公司同意向王室贷款12亿里弗尔,用于偿还全部王室债务。一个月后,劳接管了直接税的征收权。

Meanwhile, the Company of the West continued to expand. In May 1719 it took over the East India and China companies, to form the Company of the Indies (Compagnie des Indes), better known as the Mississippi Company. In July Law secured the profits of the royal mint for a nine-year term. In August he wrested the lease of the indirect tax farms from a rival financier, who had been granted it a year before. In September the Company agreed to lend 1.2 billion livres to the crown to pay off the entire royal debt. A month later Law took control of the collection (‘farm’) of direct taxes.

劳对他的体系感到自豪。他写道,此前的体系不过是“一种收支方法”。而与之相反,他的体系“是一系列相互支撑的思想,并日益展现出它们所遵循的原则。” 51用现代术语来说,劳的尝试可以被描述为通货再膨胀。1716年,法国经济陷入衰退,劳通过发行纸币扩大货币供应量,显然提供了急需的刺激。 52与此同时,他(并非毫无道理地)试图将管理不善且负担沉重的公共债务转化为一家庞大的私有化税收和垄断贸易公司的股权。 53如果他成功了,法国君主制的财政困境将就此结束。

Law was proud of his System. What had existed before, he wrote, was not much more than ‘a method of receipts and disbursements’. Here, by contrast, ‘you have a chain of ideas which support one another, and display more and more the principle they flow from.’51 In modern terms, what Law was attempting could be described as reflation. The French economy had been in recession in 1716 and Law’s expansion of the money supply with banknotes clearly did provide a much-needed stimulus.52 At the same time, he was (not unreasonably) trying to convert a badly managed and burdensome public debt into the equity of an enormous, privatized tax-gathering and monopoly trading company.53 If he were successful, the financial difficulties of the French monarchy would be at an end.

但劳并没有明确的止步点。相反,作为一家如今已庞大企业的控股股东,他强烈希望通过其银行能够创造的货币扩张来推动资产泡沫,从而从中获利最多。这就像一个人同时掌控着美国五百家顶级公司、美国财政部和联邦储备系统。这样的人会愿意冒着降低其庞大股票组合价值的风险去提高公司税或利率吗?此外,劳的体系必须制造泡沫,否则就会失败。收购其他公司和避税天堂的资金并非来自公司利润,而是通过发行新股筹集的。1719年6月17日,密西西比公司以每股550里弗尔的价格发行了5万股股票(尽管每股……)。这些股票面值均为500里弗尔,与之前的西方公司股票相同。为了确保发行成功,劳亲自承销,这种典型的冒险行为甚至让他彻夜难眠。为了避免人们认为股价上涨后只有他一人获利,他赋予了西方公司现有股东独家购买这些新股的权利(因此这些新股被称为“女儿股”;之前的股票被称为“母亲股”)。 54 1719年7月,劳发行了第三批5万股股票(“孙女股”),每股定价1000里弗尔,以筹集他所需的5000万里弗尔来支付皇家铸币厂的费用。从逻辑上讲,现有股东的股权被稀释应该会导致每股价格下降。劳如何才能证明将发行价格翻倍的合理性呢?

But Law had no clear idea where to stop. On the contrary, as the majority shareholder in what was now a vast corporation, he had a strong personal interest in allowing monetary expansion, which his own bank could generate, to fuel an asset bubble from which he more than anyone would profit. It was as if one man was simultaneously running all five hundred of the top US corporations, the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve System. Would such a person be likely to raise corporation taxes or interest rates at the risk of reducing the value of his massive share portfolio? Moreover, Law’s System had to create a bubble or it would fail. The acquisition of the various other companies and tax farms was financed, not out of company profits, but simply by issuing new shares. On 17 June 1719 the Mississippi Company issued 50,000 of these at a price of 550 livres apiece (though each share had a face value of 500 livres, as with the earlier Company of the West shares). To ensure the success of the issue, Law personally underwrote it, a characteristic gamble that even he admitted cost him a sleepless night. And to avoid the imputation that he alone would profit if the shares rose in price, he gave existing Company of the West shareholders the exclusive right to acquire these new shares (which hence became known as ‘daughters’; the earlier shares were ‘mothers’).54 In July 1719 Law issued a third tranche of 50,000 shares (the ‘granddaughters’) – now priced at 1,000 livres each – to raise the 50 million livres he needed to pay for the royal mint. Logically, this dilution of the existing shareholders ought to have caused the price of an individual share to decline. How could Law justify a doubling of the issue price?

投机对象:印度公司(又称密西西比公司)十分之一的股份

The object of speculation: A one-tenth share in the Compagnie des Indes (otherwise known as the Mississippi Company)

表面上,推高股价的“替代因素”是路易斯安那州未来利润的预期。这就是原因。劳费尽心思,将这片殖民地描绘成名副其实的伊甸园,居住着友善的“野蛮人”,他们渴望提供琳琅满目的异域商品运往法国。为了开展这项贸易,一座宏伟的新城在密西西比河口拔地而起:新奥尔良,这个名字是为了讨好那位总是容易被人奉承的摄政王。我们知道,这样的愿景并非完全没有根据,但它们的实现却遥遥无期。诚然,几千名来自莱茵兰、瑞士和阿尔萨斯的贫困德国人被招募来担任殖民者。但这些不幸的移民抵达路易斯安那后,看到的却是一片闷热潮湿、蚊虫肆虐的沼泽。不到一年,他们中就有80%的人死于饥饿或黄热病等热带疾病

Ostensibly, the ‘displacement’ that justified higher share prices was the promise of future profits from Louisiana. That was why Law devoted so much effort to conjuring up rosy visions of the colony as a veritable Garden of Eden, inhabited by friendly savages, eager to furnish a cornucopia of exotic goods for shipment to France. To conduct this trade, a grand new city was established at the mouth of the Mississippi: New Orleans, named to flatter the always susceptible Regent. Such visions, as we know, were not wholly without foundation, but their realization lay far in the future. To be sure, a few thousand impoverished Germans from the Rhineland, Switzerland and Alsace were recruited to act as colonists. But what the unfortunate immigrants encountered when they reached Louisiana was a sweltering, insect-infested swamp. Within a year 80 per cent of them had died of starvation or tropical diseases like yellow fever.*

因此,短期内,为了证明劳当时支付的40%股息的合理性,需要另一种替代方式。这种替代方式是通过纸币实现的。从1719年夏天开始,希望购买“女儿股”和“孙女股”的投资者得到了皇家银行的慷慨帮助。皇家银行允许股东以股票作抵押借款,然后用这些资金购买更多股票。不出所料,股价飙升。最初的“母亲股”在8月1日的价格为2750里弗尔,8月30日为4100里弗尔,9月4日为5000里弗尔。这促使劳以新的市场价格增发了10万股股票。随后在9月28日和10月2日又增发了相同数量的股票,两天后又发行了2.4万股(尽管这些股票从未公开发售)。 1719年秋季,股价突破9000里弗尔,并在12月2日创下新高(10025里弗尔)。非正式期货市场显示,1720年3月交割的股票交易价格为12500里弗尔。此时,市场情绪正迅速从欣喜若狂转变为狂热。55

In the short term, then, a different kind of displacement was needed to justify the 40 per cent dividends Law was now paying. It was provided by paper money. From the summer of 1719 investors who wished to acquire the ‘daughters’ and ‘granddaughters’ were generously assisted by the Banque Royale, which allowed shareholders to borrow money, using their shares as collateral; money they could then invest in more shares. Predictably, the share price soared. The original ‘mothers’ stood at 2,750 livres on 1 August, 4,100 on 30 August and 5,000 on 4 September. This prompted Law to issue 100,000 more shares at this new market price. Two further issues of the same amount followed on 28 September and 2 October, followed by a smaller block of 24,000 shares two days later (though these were never offered to the public). In the autumn of 1719 the share price passed 9,000 livres, reaching a new high (10,025) on 2 December. The informal futures market saw them trading at 12,500 livres for delivery in March 1720. The mood was now shifting rapidly from euphoria to mania.55

有些人察觉到了不对劲。“你们巴黎人都疯了吗?”伏尔泰在1719年写信给热农维尔先生说,“这里简直乱成一团。”无法理解…… 56爱尔兰银行家兼经济学家理查德·坎蒂隆确信劳的体系会崩溃,于是在1719年8月初卖掉所有家产离开了巴黎。57丹尼尔·笛福在伦敦对此不屑一顾:法国人只不过是“吹嘘了一番”。他嘲讽道,劳的事业展现了一种新的成功策略:

A few people smelt a rat. ‘Have you all gone crazy in Paris?’ wrote Voltaire to M. de Génonville in 1719. ‘It is a chaos I cannot fathom . . .’56 The Irish banker and economist Richard Cantillon was so sure that Law’s System would implode that he sold up and left Paris in early August 1719.57 From London Daniel Defoe was dismissive: the French had merely ‘run up a piece of refined air’. Law’s career, he sneered, illustrated a new strategy for success in life:

你必须佩剑,杀掉一两个情人,进纽盖特监狱,被判绞刑,如果可以的话,越狱——记住这一点——然后去某个陌生的国家,做股票投机商,搞个密西西比股票,炒作一个国家,你很快就会成为伟人;前提是你得有极好的运气…… 58

You must put on a sword, kill a beau or two, get into Newgate [prison], be condemned to be hanged, break prison if you can – remember that by the way – get over to some strange country, turn stock-jobber, set up a Mississippi stock, bubble a nation, and you will soon be a great man; if you have but great good luck . . .58

但相当一部分富裕的巴黎人被劳所吸引。他凭借自己的努力积累了巨额财富,提出支付拖欠的养老金,甚至预付养老金——这无疑是赢得特权阶层支持的有效途径。到1719年9月,数百人涌入昆坎普瓦街(rue Quincampoix),这条狭窄的街道位于圣马丁街(rue St Martin)和圣丹尼斯街(rue St Denis)之间,公司在那里设有股票发行办事处。英国大使馆的一位办事员描述道:“从清晨到深夜,这里人山人海,到处都是王子公主、公爵贵族、公爵夫人等等,总之,法国所有显赫的人物都聚集于此。他们变卖地产,典当珠宝,只为买下密西西比河。” 59 1719年访问巴黎的玛丽·沃特利·蒙塔古夫人(Lady Mary Wortley Montagu)对此“欣喜不已……”在巴黎见到一位英国人(至少是一位英国人),我指的是劳先生,他对待公爵和贵族极其高高在上,而他们也对他毕恭毕敬——可怜的人们!60正是在这段令人兴奋的时期, “百万富翁”一词首次被创造出来。(就像企业家一样,百万富翁也是在法国诞生的。)

But a substantial number of better-off Parisians were seduced by Law. Flush with cash of his own making, he offered to pay pension arrears and indeed to pay pensions in advance – a sure way to build support among the privileged classes. By September 1719 there were hundreds of people thronging the rue Quincampoix, a narrow thoroughfare between the rue St Martin and the rue St Denis where the Company had its share-issuing office. A clerk at the British embassy described it as ‘crowded from early in the morning to late at night with princes and princesses, dukes and peers and duchesses etc., in a word all that is great in France. They sell estates and pawn jewels to purchase Mississippi.’59 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who visited Paris in 1719, was ‘delighted . . . to see an Englishman (at least a Briton) absolute in Paris, I mean Mr. Law, who treats their dukes and peers extremely de haut en bas and is treated by them with the utmost submission and respect – Poor souls!’60 It was in these heady times that the word millionaire was first coined. (Like entrepreneurs, millionaires were invented in France.)

难怪约翰·劳于12月10日首次出现在弥撒中,他为了获得公职资格而皈依了天主教。他对此感激不尽。次月,他正式被任命为财政总监,至此,他的成功可谓圆满。他现在负责:

Small wonder John Law was seen at Mass for the first time on 10 December, having converted to Catholicism in order to be eligible for public office. He had much to thank his Maker for. When he was duly appointed Controller General of Finances the following month, his triumph was complete. He was now in charge of:

1719年,昆坎普瓦街的演出落幕,出自一年后在阿姆斯特丹出版的《愚行盛宴》。

The end of the show in the rue Quincampoix, 1719, from The Great Scene of Folly, published in Amsterdam a year later

法国所有间接税的征收;法国全部国债;

the collection of all France’s indirect taxes; the entire French national debt;

生产法国金银币的二十六家法国造币厂;

the twenty-six French mints that produced the country’s gold and silver coins;

路易斯安那殖民地;

the colony of Louisiana;

密西西比公司垄断了烟草的进口和销售;

the Mississippi Company, which had a monopoly on the import and sale of tobacco;

法国与加拿大的毛皮贸易;以及

the French fur trade with Canada; and

法国与非洲、亚洲和东印度群岛的所有贸易。

all France’s trade with Africa, Asia and the East Indies.

此外,劳本人还拥有:

Further, in his own right, Law owned:

黎塞留街的讷韦尔酒店(现为国家图书馆);

the Hôtel de Nevers in the rue de Richelieu (now the Bibliothèque Nationale);

马扎林宫,公司在那里设有办事处;

the Mazarin Palace, where the Company had its offices;

旺多姆广场(当时称为路易大帝广场)超过三分之一的建筑物;

more than a third of the buildings at the place Vendôme (then place Louis le Grand);

超过十二处乡村庄园;

more than twelve country estates;

路易斯安那州的几处种植园;以及

several plantations in Louisiana; and

密西西比公司1亿里弗尔的股份。61

100 million livres of shares in the Mississippi Company.61

法国国王路易十四曾说过“ L'état, c'est moi ”(我就是国家)。约翰·劳完全可以理直气壮地说“ L'économie, c'est moi ”(我就是经济)。

Louis XIV of France had said ‘L’état, c’est moi’: I am the state. John Law could legitimately say ‘L’économie, c’est moi’: I am the economy.


事实上,约翰·劳更喜欢赌博而不是祈祷。例如,1719年3月,他曾与波旁公爵打赌一千枚新路易金币,赌那年冬天和春天不会再有冰。(他输了。)另一次,他以10000比1的赔率打赌,赌他的朋友一次掷六颗骰子掷不出指定的点数。(他可能也输了,因为只有31种可能的结果;掷出21的概率大约是十分之一。)但他最大的赌注是他自己的“体系”。据一位忧心忡忡的英国外交官在1719年8月报告,劳的“日常言论”是,他要“让法国达到前所未有的高度,并使法国有能力向全欧洲颁布法律;他可以随时摧毁英国和荷兰的贸易和信誉;他可以随时摧毁我们的银行;以及我们的东印度公司。” 62为了兑现自己的诺言,劳与伦敦德里伯爵托马斯·皮特(首相威廉·皮特的叔叔)打赌,英国股票价格将在未来一年下跌。他以每股180英镑(即面值加80%)的价格卖空了价值10万英镑的东印度公司股票,交割日期为1720年8月25日。63 1719年8月底,这些股票的价格为194英镑,这表明劳预期价格会下跌14英镑。)

In truth, John Law preferred gambling to praying. In March 1719, for example, he had bet the Duke of Bourbon a thousand new louis d’or that there would be no more ice that winter or spring. (He lost.) On another occasion he wagered 10,000 to 1 that a friend could not throw a designated number with six dice at one throw. (He probably lost that too, since there are only 31 possible outcomes; the chance of throwing 21 is about one in ten.) But his biggest bet was on his own System. Law’s ‘daily discourse’, reported an uneasy British diplomat in August 1719, was that he would ‘set France higher than ever she was before, and put her in a condition to give the law to all Europe; that he can ruin the trade and credit of England and Holland, whenever he pleases; that he can break our bank, whenever he has a mind; and our East India Company.’62 Putting his money where his mouth was, Law had made a bet with Thomas Pitt, Earl of Londonderry (and uncle of the Prime Minister William Pitt), that British shares would fall in price in the year ahead. He sold £100,000 of East India stock short for £180,000 (that is at a price of £180 per share, or 80 per cent above face value) for delivery on 25 August 1720.63 (The price of the shares at the end of August 1719 was £194, indicating Law’s expectation of a £14 price decline.)

然而,罗氏信心的核心骗局不可能永远维持下去。甚至在他被任命为审计长之前,五阶段泡沫周期中的第四阶段——困境——的最初迹象就已经开始显现。1719年12月,密西西比股票价格开始下跌,12月14日跌至7930里弗尔。劳采取了众多人为手段来支撑股价,这是其中的第一个:他在皇家银行开设了一个办事处,保证以9000里弗尔的底价买卖股票。为了简化操作,1720年2月22日,公司宣布接管皇家银行。劳还发行了期权(主期权),售价1000里弗尔,持有者有权在接下来的六个月内以10000里弗尔的价格购买一股股票(即有效价格11000里弗尔——比1月8日达到的10100里弗尔的实际峰值高出900里弗尔)。这些措施足以使股价在 1 月中旬之前保持在 9,000 里弗尔以上(尽管最低价格的结果是期权变得一文不值;劳慷慨地允许持有者以每股10 个基准价格将其转换为股票)。

Yet the con at the heart of Law’s confidence could not be sustained indefinitely. Even before his appointment as Controller General, the first signs of phase 4 of the five-stage bubble cycle – distress – had begun to manifest themselves. When the Mississippi share price began to decline in December 1719, touching 7,930 livres on 14 December, Law resorted to the first of many artificial expedients to prop it up, opening a bureau at the Banque Royale that guaranteed to buy (and sell) the shares at a floor price of 9,000 livres. As if to simplify matters, on 22 February 1720 it was announced that the Company was taking over the Banque Royale. Law also created options (primes) costing 1,000 livres which entitled the owner to buy a share for 10,000 livres over the following six months (that is an effective price of 11,000 livres – 900 livres above the actual peak price of 10,100 reached on 8 January). These measures sufficed to keep the share price above 9,000 livres until mid-January (though the effect of the floor price was to render the options worthless; generously Law allowed holders to convert them into shares at the rate of ten primes per share).

然而,通货膨胀在股市之外也以惊人的速度加速蔓延。1720年9月,巴黎物价达到顶峰,约为两年前的两倍,其中大部分涨幅都发生在之前的11个月里。这反映了劳一世时期纸币流通量的惊人增长。短短一年多时间,他就使纸币数量翻了一番还多。到1720年5月,货币供应总量(包括纸币和公众持有的股票,因为后者可以随意兑换成现金)以里弗尔计价,大约是法国此前使用的金银币的四倍。 64不出所料,一些人开始预期纸币会贬值,并开始重新使用金银支付。一向专制的劳一贯如此,他的最初反应是诉诸强制手段。纸币被宣布为法定货币。金银的出口以及金银制品的生产和销售都被禁止。根据1720年2月27日颁布的法令,私人公民持有超过500里弗尔的金属硬币属于违法行为。当局被授权通过搜查民宅来强制执行这项法令。伏尔泰称之为“有史以来最不公正的法令”和“暴政荒谬的极致”。 65

Inflation, however, was now accelerating alarmingly outside the stock market. At their peak in September 1720, prices in Paris were roughly double what they had been two years before, with most of the increase coming in the previous eleven months. This was a reflection of the extraordinary increase in note circulation Law had caused. In the space of little more than a year he had more than doubled the volume of paper currency. By May 1720 the total money supply (banknotes and shares held by the public, since the latter could be turned into cash at will) was roughly four times larger in livre terms than the gold and silver coinage France had previously used.64 Not surprisingly, some people began to anticipate a depreciation of the banknotes, and began to revert to payment in gold and silver. Ever the absolutist, Law’s initial response was to resort to compulsion. Banknotes were made legal tender. The export of gold and silver was banned as was the production and sale of gold and silver objects. By the arrêt of 27 February 1720, it became illegal for a private citizen to possess more than 500 livres of metal coin. The authorities were empowered to enforce this measure by searching people’s houses. Voltaire called this ‘the most unjust edict ever rendered’ and ‘the final limit of a tyrannical absurdity’.65

与此同时,劳执着地调整纸币与黄金和白银的兑换率,在1719年9月至1720年12月间,他修改了黄金的官方价格28次,白银的价格更是高达35次——这一切都是为了让纸币比硬币更受民众青睐。然而,这些有时自相矛盾的法规只会让民众更加困惑,也暴露出专制政权为了自身利益而随意制定经济规则的倾向。“仿佛施展了一种全新的秘密魔法,”一位观察者后来回忆道,“一些晦涩难懂的文字组合成法令,无人能够理解,空气中弥漫着晦涩难懂的理念和虚幻的幻想。” 66前一天,黄金和白银可以自由出口;第二天,它们就被禁止了。前一天,纸币的印制速度达到了印刷机的极限;第二天,劳又试图将纸币的发行量限制在120万里弗尔。前一天,密西西比股票的最低价格是9000里弗尔;第二天就变了。2月22日,当最低价格被取消后,股价不出所料地暴跌。到月底,股价跌至7825里弗尔。3月5日,显然是在摄政王的压力下,劳再次改变主意,恢复了9000里弗尔的最低价格,并重新开放了股票交易窗口,允许以这个价格购买股票。但这也就意味着,股票价格的下限再次被解除。尽管同一法令中声称“纸币的价值不可更改”,且此前已承诺将发行量上限设定为120万里弗尔,但货币供应量依然大幅增加。 67此时,精明的投资者们更乐于接受每股9000里弗尔的现金。1720年2月至5月间,公众持有的纸币数量增长了94%。与此同时,他们持有的股票数量却暴跌至发行总量的不到三分之一。似乎不久之后,所有股票都将被抛售给公司,从而引发新一轮纸币发行和通货膨胀飙升。

At the same time, Law obsessively tinkered with the exchange rate of the banknotes in terms of gold and silver, altering the official price of gold twenty-eight times and the price of silver no fewer than thirty-five times between September 1719 and December 1720 – all in an effort to make banknotes more attractive than coins to the public. But the flow of sometimes contradictory regulations served only to bewilder people and to illustrate the propensity of an absolutist regime to make up the economic rules to suit itself. ‘By an all new secret magic,’ one observer later recalled, ‘words assembled and formed Edicts that no one comprehended, and the air was filled with obscure ideas and chimeras.’66 One day gold and silver could be freely exported; the next day not. One day notes were being printed as fast as the printing presses could operate; the next Law was aiming to cap the banknote supply at 1.2 million livres. One day there was a floor price of 9,000 livres for Mississippi shares; the next day not. When this floor was removed on 22 February the shares predictably slumped. By the end of the month they were down to 7,825 livres. On 5 March, apparently under pressure from the Regent, Law performed another U-turn, reinstituting the 9,000 livre floor and reopening the bureau to buy them at this price. But this meant that the lid was once again removed from the money supply – despite the assertion in the same decree that ‘the banknote was a money which could not be altered in value’, and despite the previous commitment to a 1.2 million livre cap.67 By now the smarter investors were more than happy to have 9,000 livres in cash for each of their shares. Between February and May 1720 there was a 94 per cent increase in the public’s holdings of banknotes. Meanwhile their holdings of shares slumped to less than a third of the total number issued. It seemed inevitable that before long all the shares would be unloaded on the Company, unleashing a further flood of banknotes and a surge in inflation.

5月21日,为了避免经济崩溃,劳总统孤注一掷,促使摄政王颁布通货紧缩法令,将公司股票的官方价格从9000里弗尔分阶段下调至5000里弗尔,同时将流通中的纸币数量减半。他还下令贬值纸币,此前他已撤销了保证纸币不会贬值的命令。此时,作为劳总统体制基石的君主专制的局限性突然显露出来。民众的强烈抗议迫使政府在法令颁布仅六天后便撤销了这些措施,但此时民众对体制的信心已遭受不可挽回的打击。股价在最初的平静之后,从5月16日的9005里弗尔暴跌至5月31日的4200里弗尔。愤怒的民众聚集在银行外,银行难以满足民众的纸币需求。有人投掷石块,砸碎窗户。一位英国观察家写道:“最沉重的损失落在了这个国家的人民身上,影响到他们各个阶层和所有阶层的人。他们此刻表现出的惊恐和绝望之深重,难以言表;王室成员和所有达官显贵都对此强烈谴责。” 68 在一次议会特别会议上,劳遭到了严厉的谴责。摄政王退让,撤销了5月21日的法令。劳提出辞职,但于5月29日被立即解职。他被软禁在家;他的政敌希望把他送进巴士底狱。劳一生中第二次面临牢狱之灾,甚至可能面临牢狱之灾。死亡。(调查委员会很快发现证据表明,劳发行的钞票数量超过了授权限额,因此有理由提起诉讼。)皇家银行关门大吉。

On 21 May, in a desperate bid to avert meltdown, Law induced the Regent to issue a deflationary decree, reducing the official price of Company shares in monthly steps from 9,000 livres to 5,000 and at the same time halving the number of banknotes in circulation. He also devalued the banknotes, having revoked the previous order guaranteeing that this would not happen. This was when the limits of royal absolutism, the foundation of Law’s System, suddenly became apparent. Violent public outcry forced the government to revoke these measures just six days after their announcement, but the damage to confidence in the System was, by this time, irrevocable. After an initial lull, the share price slid from 9,005 livres (16 May) to 4,200 (31 May). Angry crowds gathered outside the Bank, which had difficulty meeting the demand for notes. Stones were thrown, windows broken. ‘The heaviest loss’, wrote one British observer, ‘falls on the people of this country and affects all ranks and conditions among them. It is not possible to express how great and general their consternation and despair have appeared to be on this occasion; the Princes of the blood and all the great men exclaim very warmly against it.’68 Law was roundly denounced at an extraordinary meeting of the Parlement. The Regent retreated, revoking the 21 May decree. Law offered his resignation, but was dismissed outright on 29 May. He was placed under house arrest; his enemies wanted to see him in the Bastille. For the second time in his life, Law faced jail, conceivably even death. (An investigative commission quickly found evidence that Law’s issues of banknotes had breached the authorized limit, so grounds existed for a prosecution.) The Banque Royale closed its doors.

约翰·劳既是逃脱大师,也是骗子。很快,人们就意识到,除了他之外,无人能够阻止金融体系的彻底崩溃——毕竟,这套体系正是他一手打造的。他重返权力中心(担任地位较低的商务总监一职)后,股市出现反弹,密西西比公司的股价在6月6日回升至6350里弗尔。然而,这只是暂时的喘息。10月10日,政府被迫恢复国内交易中使用金银。此后不久,密西西比公司的股价再次下跌,9月跌至2000里弗尔,12月跌至1000里弗尔。全面恐慌已无法避免。就在此时,劳被民众唾弃,被媒体嘲讽,最终逃离了法国。临行前,他与奥尔良公爵进行了“感人告别”。 “陛下,”劳说道,“我承认我犯了严重的错误。我犯错是因为我只是个凡人,人都会犯错。但我声明,这些行为绝非出于恶意或不诚实,而且在我整个行为过程中,也不会发现任何此类行为。” 69然而,在他接受调查期间,他的妻子和女儿不被允许离开法国。

John Law was an escape artist as well as a con artist. It quickly became apparent that no one but him stood any chance of averting a complete collapse of the financial system – which was, after all, his System. His recall to power (in the less exalted post of Intendant General of Commerce) caused a rally on the stock market, with Mississippi Company shares rising back to 6,350 livres on 6 June. It was, however, only a temporary reprieve. On 10 October the government was forced to reintroduce the use of gold and silver in domestic transactions. The Mississippi share price resumed its downward slide not long after, hitting 2,000 livres in September and 1,000 in December. Full-blown panic could no longer be postponed. It was at this moment that Law, vilified by the people, and lampooned by the press, finally fled the country. He had a ‘touching farewell’ with the Duke of Orleans before he went. ‘Sire,’ said Law, ‘I acknowledge that I have made great mistakes. I made them because I am only human, and all men are liable to err. But I declare that none of these acts proceeded from malice or dishonesty, and that nothing of that character will be discovered in the whole course of my conduct.’69 Nevertheless, his wife and daughter were not allowed to leave France so long as he was under investigation.

仿佛被利剑刺穿一般,密西西比泡沫破裂了,空气逸散的声音响彻整个欧洲。一位荷兰投资者对此愤慨不已,特地在中国定制了一系列讽刺画。其中一幅的题词是:“老天爷啊,我的股票全都一文不值!”另一幅则更加直白:“垃圾股票,空谈。”在阿姆斯特丹的投资者看来,劳的公司所从事的不过是空谈——这与荷兰东印度公司形成了鲜明的对比,后者可是实实在在地交付了香料和布匹。正如一张荷兰讽刺漫画传单上的诗句所言:

As if pricked by a sword, the Mississippi Bubble had now burst, and the noise of escaping air resounded throughout Europe. So incensed was one Dutch investor that he had a series of satirical plates specially commissioned in China. The inscription on one reads: ‘By God, all my stock’s worthless!’ Another is even more direct: ‘Shit shares and wind trade.’ As far as investors in Amsterdam were concerned, Law’s company had been trading in nothing more substantial than wind – in marked contrast to the Dutch East India Company, which had literally delivered the goods in the form of spices and cloth. As the verses on one satirical Dutch cartoon flysheet put it:

这就是神奇的密西西比河谷,

因其股票交易而闻名

通过欺骗和诡计,

挥霍了无数珍宝。

然而,男人们是如何看待这些股票的呢?

那是风和烟,仅此而已。

This is the wondrous Mississippi land,

Made famous by its share dealings,

Which through deceit and devious conduct,

Has squandered countless treasures.

However men regard the shares,

It is wind and smoke and nothing more.

一系列幽默寓言式的版画被创作并出版,名为《愚行大全》。这些版画描绘了赤裸屁股的股票经纪人吃硬币、拉出密西西比股票;精神错乱的投资者在昆坎普瓦街横冲直撞,最终被送进疯人院;以及裘德·洛本人,乘坐着由两只蓬头垢面的法国公鸡拉着的马车,悠然自得地经过空中楼阁。70

A series of humorously allegorical engravings were produced and published as The Great Scene of Folly, which depicted bare-arsed stockbrokers eating coin and excreting Mississippi stock; demented investors running amok in the rue Quincampoix, before being hauled off to the madhouse; and Law himself, blithely passing by castles in the air in a carriage pulled by two bedraggled Gallic cockerels.70

劳本人也并未全身而退。由于他与伦敦德里打赌英国东印度公司的股票会跌至180英镑,他离开法国时几乎身无分文。到1720年4月,股价已涨至235英镑,并且随着投资者的涌入,股价继续上涨。他退出了巴黎股市,转而投向看似更安全的伦敦(当时伦敦也深陷于规模较小的南海泡沫之中)。到了六月,股价已涨至420英镑,八月仅略微下跌至345英镑,而劳的赌注也随之到期。劳的伦敦银行家乔治·米德尔顿也因竭力履行客户的义务而破产。然而,法国的损失远不止于经济层面。劳的泡沫破裂严重阻碍了法国的金融发展,使法国人几代人都对纸币和股票市场敬而远之。法国君主制的财政危机始终未能解决,在路易十五及其继任者路易十六的剩余统治时期,王室基本上处于捉襟见肘的状态,在一次又一次失败的改革中挣扎,直到王室破产最终引发了革命。这场灾难的严重程度或许在伯纳德·皮卡尔的精美版画《献给后世的纪念碑》(1721年)中得到了最淋漓尽致的展现。左侧,身无分文的荷兰投资者愁眉苦脸地涌入病房、疯人院和贫民院。但右侧的巴黎景象则更显末日景象。一丝不挂的福尔图娜女神将密西西比州的股票和期权如雨般倾泻在从昆坎普瓦街涌出的暴民身上,与此同时,一辆由印第安人拉动的巨型战车将一名会计师压在一个巨大的命运之轮下,而前景中,两名男子正在扭打。71

Law himself did not walk away financially unscathed. He left France with next to nothing, thanks to his bet with Londonderry that English East India stock would fall to £180. By April 1720 the price had risen to £235 and it continued to rise as investors exited the Paris market for what seemed the safer haven of London (then in the grip of its own less spectacular South Sea Bubble). By June the price was at £420, declining only slightly to £345 in August, when Law’s bet fell due. Law’s London banker, George Middleton, was also ruined in his effort to honour his client’s obligation. The losses to France, however, were more than just financial. Law’s bubble and bust fatally set back France’s financial development, putting Frenchmen off paper money and stock markets for generations. The French monarchy’s fiscal crisis went unresolved and for the remainder of the reigns of Louis XV and his successor Louis XVI the crown essentially lived from hand to mouth, lurching from one abortive reform to another until royal bankruptcy finally precipitated revolution. The magnitude of the catastrophe was perhaps best captured by Bernard Picart in his elaborate engraving Monument Consecrated to Posterity (1721). On the left, penniless Dutch investors troop morosely into the sickhouse, the madhouse and the poorhouse. But the Parisian scene to the right is more apocalyptic. A naked Fortuna rains down Mississippi stock and options on a mob emanating from the rue Quincampoix, while a juggernaut drawn by Indians crushes an accountant under a huge wheel of fortune and two men brawl in the foreground.71

购买密西西比股票的投资者的疯狂之举:选自《愚行大图》(1720 年)的版画

The madness of investors who bought Mississippi stock: engraving from The Great Scene of Folly (1720)

相比之下,英国同期发生的南海泡沫规模要小得多,造成的损失也更少——这主要是因为南海公司从未像劳控制皇家银行那样控制英格兰银行。本质上,他的英国同行约翰·布朗特的南海计划是将各种政府债务(其中大部分是为了资助西班牙王位继承战争而设立的)转换为一家公司的股权,这家公司被特许垄断与西班牙帝国在南美洲的贸易。在就年金和其他债务工具的转换价格达成一致后,南海公司的董事们如果能够让现有的政府年金持有者以高市场价格接受南海公司的股票,就能从中获利,因为这样一来,董事们就能有多余的股票出售给公众。72他们成功地做到了这一点,使用的伎俩与劳使用的伎俩类似。巴黎的法律规定,股票分四批向公众发行,价格从1720年4月的每股300英镑上涨到6月的1000英镑。允许分期付款。提供股票抵押贷款。支付丰厚的股息。欣喜若狂很快演变为狂热;正如诗人亚历山大·蒲柏所言,“(在这个充满希望和金色山脉的时代)不去冒险是可耻的” 。73

In Britain, by contrast, the contemporaneous South Sea Bubble was significantly smaller and ruined fewer people – not least because the South Sea Company never gained control of the Bank of England the way Law had controlled the Banque Royale. In essence, his English counterpart John Blunt’s South Sea scheme was to convert government debt of various kinds, most of it created to fund the War of the Spanish Succession, into the equity of a company that had been chartered to monopolize trade with the Spanish Empire in South America. Having agreed on conversion prices for the annuities and other debt instruments, the directors of the South Sea Company stood to profit if they could get the existing holders of government annuities to accept South Sea shares at a high market price, since this would leave the directors with surplus shares to sell to the public.72 In this they succeeded, using tricks similar to those employed by Law in Paris. Shares were offered to the public in four tranches, with the price rising from £300 per share in April 1720 to £1,000 in June. Instalment payment was permitted. Loans were offered against shares. Generous dividends were paid. Euphoria duly gave way to mania; as the poet Alexander Pope observed, it was ‘ignominious (in this Age of Hope and Golden Mountains) not to Venture’.73

伯纳德·皮卡尔,《献给后世的纪念碑》(1721年)

Bernard Picart, Monument Consecrated to Posterity (1721)

然而,与劳不同的是,布朗特及其同伙不得不应对来自英格兰银行的竞争,这迫使他们提高向年金领取者提供的条件。与劳不同的是,他们还必须应对议会中辉格党的政治反对,这导致他们为了获得有利的立法而不得不支付更高的贿赂(仅财政部秘书一人就从股票期权中获利24.9万英镑)。而且,与劳不同的是,他们无法在股票市场和信贷市场建立垄断地位。相反,1720年涌现出大量新公司——总共190家——寻求筹集资金,以至于南海公司的董事们不得不游说他们在议会的盟友,通过后来被称为“泡沫法案”的法案,旨在限制新公司的上市。*与此同时,当南海公司第三次认购产生的现金需求超过了货币市场的供应能力时,董事们却无力注入额外的流动性;事实上,南海公司的银行——剑刃公司(Sword Blade Company)——最终于9月24日倒闭。(与英格兰银行和皇家银行不同,剑刃公司的纸币并非法定货币。)五月和六月的狂热过后,七月经历了一段短暂的动荡时期(当时内部人士和外国投机者获利了结),八月又爆发了恐慌。“大多数人都认为它终会到来,”不幸且如今更加贫穷的波普哀叹道,“但没有人为此做好准备;没有人想到它会像夜贼一样悄然而至,就像死亡一样。” 74

Unlike Law, however, Blunt and his associates had to contend with competition from the Bank of England, which drove up the terms they had to offer the annuitants. Unlike Law, they also had to contend with political opposition in the form of the Whigs in Parliament, which drove up the bribes they had to pay to secure favourable legislation (the Secretary to the Treasury alone made £249,000 from his share options). And, unlike Law, they were unable to establish monopolistic positions on the stock market and the credit market. On the contrary, there was such a rush of new companies – 190 in all – seeking to raise capital in 1720 that the South Sea directors had to get their allies in Parliament to pass what came to be known as the Bubble Act, designed to restrict new company flotations.* At the same time, when the demand for cash created by the South Sea’s third subscription exceeded the money market’s resources, there was nothing the directors could do to inject additional liquidity; indeed, the South Sea Company’s bank, the Sword Blade Company, ended up failing on 24 September. (Unlike the Bank of England, and unlike the Banque Royale, its notes were not legal tender.) The mania of May and June was followed, after a hiatus of distress in July (when the insiders and foreign speculators took their profits), by panic in August. ‘Most people thought it wou’d come,’ lamented the hapless and now poorer Pope, ‘but no man prepar’d for it; no man consider’d it would come like a Thief in the night, exactly as it happens in the case of death.’74

然而,泡沫破裂造成的损失远不及海峡对岸的灾难性后果。南海股票的价格从平价到峰值上涨了9.5倍,而密西西比股票的价格则上涨了19.6倍。其他股票(如英格兰银行和东印度公司)的涨幅则小得多。当伦敦的股价回落时,除了《泡沫法案》对未来股份制公司成立的限制外,金融体系并未遭受持久的系统性损害。南海公司本身继续存在;政府债务转换并未被逆转;外国投资者也没有撤离英国证券。 75尽管整个法国都受到了劳引发的通胀危机的影响,但英国各省似乎并未受到南海泡沫破裂的太大影响。 76在这两个泡沫的故事中,遭受损失最严重的是法国。

Yet the damage caused by the bursting of the bubble was much less fatal than on the other side of the Channel. From par to peak, prices rose by a factor of 9.5 in the case of South Sea stock, compared with 19.6 in the case of Mississippi stock. Other stocks (Bank of England and East India Company) rose by substantially smaller multiples. When stock prices came back down to earth in London, there was no lasting systemic damage to the financial system, aside from the constraint on future joint-stock company formation represented by the Bubble Act. The South Sea Company itself continued to exist; the government debt conversion was not reversed; foreign investors did not turn away from English securities.75 Whereas all France was affected by the inflationary crisis Law had unleashed, provincial England seems to have been little affected by the South Sea crash.76 In this tale of two bubbles, it was the French that had the worst of times.

牛市和熊市

Bulls and Bears

1929年10月16日,耶鲁大学经济学教授欧文·费雪宣称,美国股市“似乎已经达到了一个永久性的高位”。 77八天后,即“黑色星期四”,道琼斯工业平均指数下跌了2%。人们普遍认为华尔街股市崩盘始于此,但事实上,股市自9月初以来就一直在下滑,并在10月23日暴跌了6%。在“黑色星期一”(10月28日),股市暴跌了13%;第二天又下跌了12%。在接下来的三年里,美国股市暴跌了惊人的89%,并在1932年7月跌至谷底。直到1954年11月,该指数才重新回到1929年的峰值。更糟糕的是,这场资产价格通缩与历史上最严重的经济大萧条同时发生,甚至可能是其直接原因。在美国,经济产出骤降了三分之一。失业率高达平民劳动力的四分之一,如果采用现代定义,则接近三分之一。这是一场全球性灾难,几乎世界所有经济体的物价和产出都出现下滑,但只有德国的经济衰退与美国一样严重。世界贸易萎缩了三分之二,各国徒劳地试图利用关税壁垒和进口配额来掩盖损失。国际金融体系在债务违约、资本管制和货币贬值的混乱中崩溃瓦解。只有实行自给自足计划经济的苏联幸免于难。这一切究竟是如何发生的?

On 16 October 1929 Yale University economics professor Irving Fisher declared that US stock prices had ‘reached what looks like a permanently high plateau’.77 Eight days later, on ‘Black Thursday’, the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined by 2 per cent. This is when the Wall Street crash is conventionally said to have begun, though in fact the market had been slipping since early September and had already suffered a sharp 6 per cent drop on 23 October. On ‘Black Monday’ (28 October) it plunged by 13 per cent; the next day by a further 12 per cent. In the course of the next three years the US stock market declined a staggering 89 per cent, reaching its nadir in July 1932. The index did not regain its 1929 peak until November 1954. What was worse, this asset price deflation coincided with, if it did not actually cause, the worst depression in all history. In the United States, output collapsed by a third. Unemployment reached a quarter of the civilian labour force, closer to a third if a modern definition is used. It was a global catastrophe that saw prices and output decline in nearly every economy in the world, though only the German slump was as severe as the American. World trade shrank by two thirds as countries sought vainly to hide behind tariff barriers and import quotas. The international financial system fell to pieces in a welter of debt defaults, capital controls and currency depreciations. Only the Soviet Union, with its autarkic, planned economy, was unaffected. Why did it happen?

有些金融灾难的原因显而易见。可以说,1914年7月底发生的股市崩盘更为严重,当时第一次世界大战的爆发引发了彻底的崩溃,导致包括纽约在内的世界主要股市被迫关闭。这些股市从8月一直关闭到1914年底。78但那是世界大战对金融市场的突如其来的打击。79 1929年10月的股市崩盘则更难解释。《纽约时报》在“黑色星期四”前一天的头版刊登了关于法国股市崩盘的文章。总理阿里斯蒂德·白里安和美国参议院就进口化学品关税进行的投票。历史学家有时认为,德国一战后赔款僵局和美国保护主义抬头​​是引发大萧条的导火索。但头版也刊登了至少四篇关于前一天袭击美国东海岸的恶劣风暴的报道。或许历史学家应该把华尔街股市崩盘归咎于恶劣天气。(这或许并非牵强附会。许多伦敦金融城的老员工仍然记得,1987年10月19日——黑色星期一——发生在飓风级强风席卷英格兰东南部的前一个星期五之后。)

Some financial disasters have obvious causes. Arguably a much worse stock market crash had occurred at the end of July 1914, when the outbreak of the First World War precipitated such a total meltdown that the world’s principal stock markets – including New York’s – simply had to close their doors. And closed they remained from August until the end of 1914.78 But that was the effect of a world war that struck financial markets like a bolt from the blue.79 The crash of October 1929 is much harder to explain. Page 1 of the New York Times on the day before Black Thursday featured articles about the fall of the French premier Aristide Briand and a vote in the US Senate about duties on imported chemicals. Historians sometimes see the deadlock over Germany’s post-First World War reparations and the increase of American protectionism as triggers of the Depression. But page 1 also features at least four reports on the atrocious gales that had battered the Eastern seaboard the previous day.80 Maybe historians should blame bad weather for the Wall Street crash. (That might not be such a far-fetched proposition. Many veterans of the City of London still remember that Black Monday – 19 October 1987 – came after the hurricane-force winds that had unexpectedly swept the south-east of England the previous Friday.)

当时的人们意识到这场危机存在心理因素。富兰克林·罗斯福总统在就职演说中指出,美国人唯一需要恐惧的就是“恐惧本身”。约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯则谈到“精神层面的无形机制失效”。然而,两人也都暗示,这场危机部分源于金融领域的不当行为。罗斯福抨击了华尔街“不择手段的货币兑换商”;凯恩斯在其著作《通论》中将股市比作赌场。

Contemporaries sensed that there was a psychological dimension to the crisis. In his inaugural address, President Franklin Roosevelt argued that all that Americans had to fear was ‘fear itself’. John Maynard Keynes spoke of a ‘failure in the immaterial devices of the mind’. Yet both men also intimated that the crisis was partly due to financial misconduct. Roosevelt took a swipe at ‘the unscrupulous money changers’ of Wall Street; in his General Theory, Keynes likened the stock market to a casino.

在某种程度上,可以说大萧条的根源在于1914年危机引发的全球经济动荡。第一次世界大战期间,非欧洲国家的农业和工业生产扩张。战后,欧洲的生产恢复运转,但产能长期过剩,早在1929年之前就已导致初级产品价格下跌。这使得背负巨额战争债务的国家(包括背负巨额赔款的德国)更难赚取足够的硬通货来支付外国债权人的利息。战争也增强了大多数参战国劳工组织的实力,使得雇主更难因物价下跌而削减工资。随着实际工资上涨挤压利润空间,企业被迫裁员,否则将面临破产的风险。然而,美国作为这场危机的中心,在许多方面都受到了冲击,这仍然是不争的事实。在经济大萧条爆发时,美国经济正处于蓬勃发展的时期。两次世界大战期间,杜邦(尼龙)、宝洁(洗衣粉)、露华浓(化妆品)、RCA(收音机)和IBM(会计机)等公司不断进行提高生产力的技术创新。耶鲁大学的欧文·费舍尔认为:“预期未来收益会更高的主要原因在于,我们美国人正在以前所未有的方式将科学和发明应用于工业。” 81通用汽车公司的阿尔弗雷德·斯隆等人也在革新管理实践。

In some measure, it can be argued, the Great Depression had its roots in the global economic dislocations arising from the earlier crisis of 1914. During the First World War, non-European agricultural and industrial production had expanded. When European production came back on stream after the return of peace, there was chronic over-capacity, which had driven down prices of primary products long before 1929. This had made it even harder for countries with large external war debts (including Germany, saddled with reparations) to earn the hard currency they needed to make interest payments to their foreign creditors. The war had also increased the power of organized labour in most combatant countries, making it harder for employers to cut wages in response to price falls. As profit margins were squeezed by rising real wages, firms were forced to lay off workers or risk going bust. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the United States, which was the epicentre of the crisis, was in many respects in fine economic fettle when the Depression struck. There was no shortage of productivity-enhancing technological innovation in the inter-war period by companies like DuPont (nylon), Procter & Gamble (soap powder), Revlon (cosmetics), RCA (radio) and IBM (accounting machines). ‘A prime reason for expecting future earnings to be greater,’ argued Yale’s Irving Fisher, ‘was that we in America were applying science and invention to industry as we had never applied them before.’81 Management practices were also being revolutionized by men like Alfred Sloan at General Motors.

然而,正是这些优势或许正是引发经典股市泡沫的最初推手。在费舍尔等观察家看来,股市似乎真的没有上限,越来越多的美国家庭渴望拥有汽车和耐用消费品——分期付款使他们能够负担得起这些产品。20世纪20年代的科技股RCA在1925年至1929年间飙升了惊人的939%;其市盈率在市场巅峰时期高达73倍。这种狂热刺激了新股上市热潮;1929年发行的股票价值达60亿美元,其中六分之一是在9月份发行的。同时,一种名为投资信托的新型金融机构也大量涌现,旨在从股市繁荣中获利。 (高盛选择在1929年8月8日宣布其扩张计划,即成立高盛交易公司;如果该公司并非独立实体,其随后的倒闭很可能也会拖垮高盛本身。)与此同时,许多小投资者(例如欧文·费雪本人)依靠杠杆来增加其在股市的投资,利用经纪人的贷款(通常由公司而非银行提供)进行融资购买股票,从而只需用自有资金支付一小部分购买价格。正如1719年一样,1929年也出现了不择手段的内部人士,例如国民城市银行的查尔斯·E·米切尔或通用汽车的威廉·克拉波·杜兰特,以及天真的外部人士,例如格劳乔·马克思。83与1719年一样,金融市场之间的热钱流动放大并传递了冲击。而且,正如……1719年,货币当局的行动决定了泡沫的规模以及泡沫破裂时的后果。

Yet precisely these strengths may have provided the initial displacement that set in motion a classic stock market bubble. To observers like Fisher, it really did seem as if the sky was the limit, as more and more American households aspired to equip themselves with automobiles and consumer durables – products which instalment credit put within their reach. RCA, the tech stock of the 1920s, rose by a dizzying 939 per cent between 1925 and 1929; its price-earnings ratio at the peak of the market was 73.82 Euphoria encouraged a rush of new initial public offerings (IPOs); stock worth $6 billion was issued in 1929, one sixth of it during September. There was a proliferation of new financial institutions known as investment trusts, designed to capitalize on the stock market boom. (Goldman Sachs chose 8 August 1929 to announce its own expansion plan, in the form of the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation; had this not been a free-standing entity, its subsequent collapse might well have taken down Goldman Sachs itself.) At the same time, many small investors (like Irving Fisher himself) relied on leverage to increase their stock market exposure, using brokers’ loans (which were often supplied by corporations rather than banks) to buy stocks on margin, thus paying only a fraction of the purchase price with their own money. As in 1719, so in 1929, there were unscrupulous insiders, like Charles E. Mitchell of National City Bank or William Crapo Durant of GM, and ingenuous outsiders, like Groucho Marx.83 As in 1719, flows of hot money between financial markets served to magnify and transmit shocks. And, as in 1719, it was the action of the monetary authorities that determined the magnitude of the bubble and of the consequences when it burst.

在或许是美国经济史上最重要的著作中,米尔顿·弗里德曼和安娜·施瓦茨认为,美联储系统应对1929年危机演变为大萧条负有主要责任。 84他们并没有将泡沫本身归咎于美联储,而是认为,在纽约联邦储备银行行长本杰明·斯特朗的领导下,美国在维护恢复金本位制的国际义务和维护国内物价稳定的义务之间取得了合理的平衡。通过冲销流入美国的大量黄金(防止其导致货币扩张),美联储或许确实阻止了泡沫进一步扩大。纽约联邦储备银行还通过进行大规模(且未经授权的)公开市场操作(从金融部门购买债券)向市场注入流动性,有效地应对了1929年10月的恐慌。然而,在斯特朗于1928年10月因肺结核去世后,位于华盛顿的联邦储备委员会开始主导货币政策,并带来了灾难性的后果。首先,应对银行倒闭造成的信贷紧缩措施不足。这个问题在股市崩盘前几个月就已经出现,当时存款超过8000万美元的商业银行暂停了支付。然而,直到1930年11月和12月,危机才达到临界点,当时有608家银行倒闭,存款总额达5.5亿美元,其中包括美国银行,其损失的存款占总损失的三分之一以上。原本可能挽救美国银行的合并谈判失败,是经济大萧条历史上的一个关键时刻。其次,在1913年之前的体系下,在美联储成立之前,此类危机本应触发银行存款兑换黄金的限制。然而,美联储却通过减少未偿信贷额度(1930年12月至1931年4月)使情况变得更糟。这迫使越来越多的银行……为了寻求流动性,银行纷纷疯狂抛售资产,导致债券价格下跌,整体形势恶化。1931年2月至8月间,下一波银行倒闭潮导致商业银行存款减少27亿美元,占总存款的9%。 86第三,1931年9月英国放弃金本位制,引发外国银行争相将美元储备兑换成黄金,美联储分两步将贴现率提高至3.5%。这虽然阻止了外部资金外流,但也导致更多美国银行破产:1931年8月至1932年1月期间,共有1860家银行倒闭,存款损失达14.5亿美元。 87然而,美联储并没有面临黄金短缺的危险。在英镑退出金本位制前夕,美国黄金储备达到历史最高水平47亿美元,占全球总储备的40%。即使在1932年10月的最低点,美联储的黄金储备也比其法定对冲要求高出10亿美元以上。88第四,直到1932年4月,在巨大的政治压力下,美联储才尝试大规模公开市场操作,这是它为应对流动性危机而采取的第一个真正有效的措施。即便如此,也未能阻止1932年最后一个季度最后一波银行倒闭潮的到来,这场倒闭潮引发了首次全州范围内的“银行假日”,即所有银行暂时关闭。89第五,当有关罗斯福新政府将贬值美元的传言导致国内外资金再次从美元涌向黄金时,美联储再次提高贴现率,为罗斯福在1933年3月6日(就职两天后)宣布的全国性银行假日埋下了伏笔——2000家银行从此再也没有恢复营业。90

In perhaps the most important work of American economic history ever published, Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz argued that it was the Federal Reserve System that bore the primary responsibility for turning the crisis of 1929 into a Great Depression.84 They did not blame the Fed for the bubble itself, arguing that with Benjamin Strong at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York a reasonable balance had been struck between the international obligation of the United States to maintain the restored gold standard and its domestic obligation to maintain price stability. By sterilizing the large gold inflows to the United States (preventing them for generating monetary expansion), the Fed may indeed have prevented the bubble from growing even larger. The New York Fed also responded effectively to the October 1929 panic by conducting large-scale (and unauthorized) open market operations (buying bonds from the financial sector) to inject liquidity into the market. However, after Strong’s death from tuberculosis in October 1928, the Federal Reserve Board in Washington came to dominate monetary policy, with disastrous results. First, too little was done to counteract the credit contraction caused by banking failures. This problem had already surfaced several months before the stock market crash, when commercial banks with deposits of more than $80 million suspended payments. However, it reached critical mass in November and December 1930, when 608 banks failed, with deposits totalling $550 million, among them the Bank of United States, which accounted for more than a third of the total deposits lost. The failure of merger talks that might have saved the Bank was a critical moment in the history of the Depression.85 Secondly, under the pre-1913 system, before the Fed had been created, a crisis of this sort would have triggered a restriction of convertibility of bank deposits into gold. However, the Fed made matters worse by reducing the amount of credit outstanding (December 1930–April 1931). This forced more and more banks to sell assets in a frantic dash for liquidity, driving down bond prices and worsening the general position. The next wave of bank failures, between February and August 1931, saw commercial bank deposits fall by $2.7 billion, 9 per cent of the total.86 Thirdly, when Britain abandoned the gold standard in September 1931, precipitating a rush by foreign banks to convert dollar holdings into gold, the Fed raised its discount rate in two steps to 3.5 per cent. This halted the external drain, but drove yet more US banks over the edge: the period August 1931 to January 1932 saw 1,860 banks fail with deposits of $1.45 billion.87 Yet the Fed was in no danger of running out of gold. On the eve of the pound’s departure the US gold stock was at an all-time high of $4.7 billion – 40 per cent of the world’s total. Even at its lowest point that October, the Fed’s gold reserves exceeded its legal requirements for cover by more than $1 billion.88 Fourthly, only in April 1932, as a result of massive political pressure, did the Fed attempt large-scale open market operations, the first serious step it had taken to counter the liquidity crisis. Even this did not suffice to avert a final wave of bank failures in the last quarter of 1932, which precipitated the first state-wide ‘bank holidays’, temporary closures of all banks.89 Fifthly, when rumours that the new Roosevelt administration would devalue the dollar led to a renewed domestic and foreign flight from dollars into gold, the Fed once again raised the discount rate, setting the scene for the nationwide bank holiday proclaimed by Roosevelt on 6 March 1933, two days after his inauguration – a holiday from which 2,000 banks never returned.90

美联储未能阻止约1万家银行倒闭,其后果不仅在于消费者存款损失和股东权益受损所遭受的冲击,更在于其对货币供应量和信贷规模的更广泛影响。1929年至1933年间,公众现金持有量增加了31%;商业银行准备金几乎没有变化(事实上,幸存的银行还积累了超额准备金);但商业银行存款下降了37%,贷款下降了47%。数据揭示了“大萎缩”的致命后果。公众手中现金增加12亿美元,是以银行存款减少156亿美元、银行贷款减少196亿美元为代价的,相当于1929年GDP的19% 。91

The Fed’s inability to avert a total of around 10,000 bank failures was crucial not just because of the shock to consumers whose deposits were lost or to shareholders whose equity was lost, but because of the broader effect on the money supply and the volume of credit. Between 1929 and 1933, the public succeeded in increasing its cash holdings by 31 per cent; commercial bank reserves were scarcely altered (indeed, surviving banks built up excess reserves); but commercial bank deposits decreased by 37 per cent and loans by 47 per cent. The absolute numbers reveal the lethal dynamic of the ‘great contraction’. An increase of cash in public hands of $1.2 billion was achieved at the cost of a decline in bank deposits of $15.6 billion and a decline in bank loans of $19.6 billion, equivalent to 19 per cent of 1929 GDP.91

曾几何时,学院派历史学家对声称可以从历史中汲取教训感到不安。而经济学家则完全没有这种感觉,两代经济学家为了避免大萧条重演,一直在努力解释其确切原因。在所有这些集体努力中,最重要的教训莫过于:在资产价格暴跌之后,如果货币政策不力或僵化,就可能将经济调整演变为衰退,将衰退演变为萧条。弗里德曼和施瓦茨认为,美联储应该从1929年起就积极向银行体系注入流动性,大规模开展公开市场操作,并通过贴现窗口扩大而非收缩贷款。他们还建议,当时应该减少对黄金外流的关注。而最近,有人提出,两次世界大战之间的金本位制本身才是问题所在,因为它将危机(例如1931年的欧洲银行和货币危机)传播到了世界各地。92因此,历史的第二个教训似乎是,稳定汇率带来的好处并不足以抵消国内通货紧缩的代价。今天,任何怀疑历史经验教训是否可取的人,只需比较一下现任美联储主席的学术著作和近期行动即可。93

There was a time when academic historians felt squeamish about claiming that lessons could be learned from history. This is a feeling unknown to economists, two generations of whom have struggled to explain the Great Depression precisely in order to avoid its recurrence. Of all the lessons to have emerged from this collective effort, this remains the most important: that inept or inflexible monetary policy in the wake of a sharp decline in asset prices can turn a correction into a recession and a recession into a depression. According to Friedman and Schwartz, the Fed should have aggressively sought to inject liquidity into the banking system from 1929 onwards, using open market operations on a large scale, and expanding rather than contracting lending through the discount window. They also suggest that less attention should have been paid to gold outflows. More recently, it has been argued that the inter-war gold standard itself was the problem, in that it transmitted crises (like the 1931 European bank and currency crises) around the world.92 A second lesson of history would therefore seem to be that the benefits of a stable exchange rate are not so great as to exceed the costs of domestic deflation. Anyone who today doubts that there are lessons to be learned from history needs do no more than compare the academic writings and recent actions of the current chairman of the Federal Reserve System.93

肥尾巴的故事

A Tale of Fat Tails

有时候,最重要的历史事件反而是那些未发生的事件:那些没有发生的事情。经济学家海曼·明斯基对此做了很好的诠释,他曾指出:“二战以来最重要的经济事件是……并未发生:并未出现“深刻而持久的经济衰退”。94确实令人惊讶,因为世界并不缺乏“黑暗时期”。

Sometimes the most important historical events are the non-events: the things that did not occur. The economist Hyman Minsky put it well when he observed: ‘The most significant economic event of the era since World War II is something that has not happened: there has not been a deep and long-lasting depression’.94 This is indeed surprising, since the world has not been short of ‘Black Days’.

如果股市指数的波动像人的身高一样呈统计分布,那么几乎不会出现极端波动的日子。大多数时候,波动会集中在平均值附近,只有极少数会出现极端的上涨或下跌。毕竟,我们当中很少有人身高低于四英尺或高于八英尺。如果我根据金融史课上男生的身高频率绘制他们的身高直方图,结果会是一条经典的钟形曲线,几乎所有人的身高都集中在美国平均身高(约5英尺10英寸)的五英寸范围内。但在金融市场,情况并非如此。如果你把道琼斯指数的月度走势绘制在图表上,你会发现围绕平均值的聚集程度要低得多,而且极端值附近会出现更多大幅的涨跌,统计学家称之为“肥尾”。如果股市走势像人的身高一样遵循“正态分布”或钟形曲线,那么每年下跌10%或更多的情况大约每500年才会发生一次,而道琼斯指数大约每五年就会发生一次。95 股市暴跌20%或更多的情况更是闻所未闻——就像身高只有一英尺的人一样——但事实上,上个世纪就发生了九次这样的崩盘。

If movements in stock market indices were statistically distributed like human heights there would hardly be any such days. Most would be clustered around the average, with only a tiny number of extreme ups or downs. After all, not many of us are below four feet in height or above eight feet. If I drew a histogram of the heights of the male students in my financial history class according to their frequency, the result would be a classic bell-shaped curve, with nearly everyone clustered within around five inches of the US average of around 5' 10". But in financial markets, it doesn’t look like this. If you plot all the monthly movements of the Dow Jones index on a chart, there is much less clustering around the average, and there are many more big rises and falls out at the extremes, which the statisticians call ‘fat tails’. If stock market movements followed the ‘normal distribution’ or bell curve, like human heights, an annual drop of 10 per cent or more would happen only once every 500 years, whereas on the Dow Jones it has happened about once every five years.95 And stock market plunges of 20 per cent or more would be unheard of – rather like people just a foot tall – whereas in fact there have been nine such crashes in the past century.

1987年10月19日,被称为“黑色星期一”,道琼斯指数暴跌23%,这是该指数历史上仅有的四次单日跌幅超过10%的情况之一。第二天,《纽约时报》的头版标题“1987年会重蹈1929年的覆辙吗?”可谓一语道破了当时的惨状。从峰值到谷底,道琼斯指数下跌了近三分之一,美国股市市值损失近万亿美元。当时,关于股市崩盘的原因众说纷纭。诚然,美联储在前一个月将利率从5.5%上调至6%。但由尼古拉斯·布雷迪主持的官方特别工作组将股市崩盘的大部分责任归咎于“少数机构采用投资组合保险策略,以及少数共同基金集团对赎回做出反应,进行机械的、对价格不敏感的抛售”,以及“一些激进的交易型机构试图抛售”。市场预期会进一步下跌。纽约证券交易所的自动交易系统崩溃,以及缺乏可能中断期货和期权市场抛售的“熔断机制”,使情况雪上加霜。96然而,令人瞩目的是接下来发生的事情——或者更确切地说,是没有发生的事情。尽管里斯-莫格勋爵等人曾发出警告,但20世纪90年代并没有出现大萧条。97甚至1988年也没有出现经济衰退(1990-91年只有一次轻微的衰退)。在“黑色星期一”事件发生一年多后,道琼斯指数就回到了崩盘前的水平。毫无疑问,这要归功于各国央行行长,尤其是当时刚刚接替保罗·沃尔克两个月的美联储主席艾伦·格林斯潘。格林斯潘对“黑色星期一”崩盘的反应迅速而有效。 10月20日,他发表了一份简短声明,重申美联储“随时准备作为流动性来源,支持经济和金融体系”。这份声明向市场,尤其是纽约的银行发出信号:如果情况真的恶化,他随时准备出手相救。98美联储积极在公开市场上购买政府债券,向体系注入了急需的资金,在短短16天内就将美联储的借贷成本降低了近2%。华尔街终于松了一口气。明斯基所说的“那件事”并没有发生。

On ‘Black Monday’, 19 October 1987, the Dow fell by a terrifying 23 per cent, one of just four days when the index has fallen by more than 10 per cent in a single trading session. The New York Times’s front page the next morning said it all when it asked ‘Does 1987 Equal 1929?’ From peak to trough, the fall was of nearly one third, a loss in the value of American stocks of close to a trillion dollars. The causes of the crash were much debated at the time. True, the Fed had raised rates the previous month from 5.5 to 6 per cent. But the official task force chaired by Nicholas Brady laid much of the blame for the crash on ‘mechanical, price-insensitive selling by a [small] number of institutions employing portfolio insurance strategies and a small number of mutual fund groups reacting to redemptions’, as well as ‘a number of aggressive trading-oriented institutions [which tried] to sell in anticipation of further market declines’. Matters were made worse by a breakdown in the New York Stock Exchange’s automated transaction system, and by the lack of ‘circuit breakers’ which might have interrupted the sell-off on the futures and options markets.96 The remarkable thing, however, was what happened next – or rather, what didn’t happen. There was no Great Depression of the 1990s, despite the forebodings of Lord Rees-Mogg and others.97 There wasn’t even a recession in 1988 (only a modest one in 1990–91). Within little more than a year of Black Monday, the Dow was back to where it had been before the crash. For this, some credit must unquestionably be given to the central bankers, and particularly the then novice Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who had taken over from Paul Volcker just two months before. Greenspan’s response to the Black Monday crash was swift and effective. His terse statement on 20 October, affirming the Fed’s ‘readiness to serve as a source of liquidity to support the economic and financial system’, sent a signal to the markets, and particularly the New York banks, that if things got really bad he stood ready to bail them out.98 Aggressively buying government bonds in the open market, the Fed injected badly needed cash into the system, pushing down the cost of borrowing from the Fed by nearly 2 per cent in the space of sixteen days. Wall Street breathed again. What Minsky called ‘It’ had not happened.

格林斯潘曾成功遏制过一次恐慌,此后他心中一直萦绕着一个难题:下次是否应该采取先发制人的措施,彻底杜绝恐慌的发生。随着20世纪90年代中期经典股市泡沫的形成,这一难题变得尤为突出。这次的替代因素是个人电脑与互联网融合后,科技和软件行业的创新爆发。但正如历史上所有泡沫一样,宽松的货币政策也发挥了作用。联邦基金目标利率*从1995年6月的峰值6%降至5.25%(1996年1月)。1996年至1997年2月期间)。1997年3月,利率上调至5.5%,但随后在1998年9月至11月间逐步下调至4.75%;并一直维持在该水平直至1999年5月,此时道琼斯指数已突破10000点大关。利率直到1999年6月才再次上调。

Having contained a panic once, the dilemma that lurked in the back of Greenspan’s mind thereafter was whether or not to act pre-emptively the next time – to prevent the panic altogether. This dilemma came to the fore as a classic stock market bubble took shape in the mid-1990s. The displacement in this case was the explosion of innovation by the technology and software industry as personal computers met the Internet. But, as in all history’s bubbles, an accommodative monetary policy also played a role. From a peak of 6 per cent in June 1995, the federal funds target rate* had been reduced to 5.25 per cent (January 1996–February 1997). It had been raised to 5.5 per cent in March 1997, but then cut in steps between September and November 1998 down to 4.75 per cent; and it remained at that level until May 1999, by which time the Dow had passed the 10,000 mark. Rates were not raised until June 1999.

为什么美联储在20世纪90年代放任市场狂热蔓延?早在1996年12月5日,道琼斯指数突破6000点后不久,格林斯潘本人就不得不就股市的“非理性繁荣”发出警告。*然而,1997年3月加息25个基点几乎不足以驱散这种狂热。部分原因是格林斯潘及其同事似乎低估了科技泡沫的势头。早在1995年12月,道琼斯指数刚刚突破5000点大关时,美联储公开市场委员会的成员就推测市场可能即将见顶。99部分原因是格林斯潘认为美联储不应担忧资产价格通胀,而应关注消费者价格通胀;他认为,科技繁荣带来的生产率大幅提高正在降低消费者价格通胀。100部分原因,正如股市泡沫中经常发生的那样,是因为国际压力——在本例中,是1998年8月俄罗斯债务违约引发的危机——要求采取相反的行动。101部分原因,是因为格林斯潘和他的同事们不再认为美联储的职责是“把派对上的酒碗拿走”,用他前三任前任威廉·麦克切斯尼·马丁的话来说。102公平地说,格林斯潘的“即时货币政策”这无疑避免了一场股市崩盘。不仅避免了重蹈20世纪30年代的覆辙,也避免了日本的悲剧重演。当时,日本央行试图刺破资产泡沫,结果却引发了股市80%的暴跌和长达十年的经济停滞。但这种策略也付出了代价。在股市历史上,资产价格泡沫并非首次为舞弊和市场狂热创造了滋生的温床。

Why did the Fed allow euphoria to run loose in the 1990s? Greenspan himself had felt constrained to warn about ‘irrational exuberance’ on the stock market as early as 5 December 1996, shortly after the Dow had risen above 6,000.* Yet the quarter point rate increase of March 1997 was scarcely sufficient to dispel that exuberance. Partly, Greenspan and his colleagues seem to have underestimated the momentum of the technology bubble. As early as December 1995, with the Dow just past the 5,000 mark, members of the Fed’s Open Market Committee speculated that the market might be approaching its peak.99 Partly, it was because Greenspan felt it was not for the Fed to worry about asset price inflation, only consumer price inflation; and this, he believed, was being reduced by a major improvement in productivity due precisely to the tech boom.100 Partly, as so often happens in stock market bubbles, it was because international pressures – in this case, the crisis precipitated by the Russian debt default of August 1998 – required contrary action.101 Partly, it was because Greenspan and his colleagues no longer believed it was the role of the Fed to remove the punchbowl from the party, in the phrase of his precursor but three, William McChesney Martin, Jr.102 To give Greenspan his due, his ‘just-in-time monetary policy’ certainly averted a stock market crash. Not only were the 1930s averted; so too was a repeat of the Japanese experience, when a conscious effort by the central bank to prick an asset bubble ended up triggering an 80 per cent stock market sell-off and a decade of economic stagnation. But there was a price to pay for this strategy. Not for the first time in stock market history, an asset-price bubble created the perfect conditions for malfeasance as well as exuberance.

在一些忧心忡忡的观察者看来,九十年代似乎与二十年代的繁荣景象惊人地相似;事实上,九十年代股市的走势几乎与二十年代如出一辙。然而,在某些方面,它更像是十七二十年代的重演。正如约翰·劳的密西西比公司是开启十八世纪泡沫经济的罪魁祸首一样,另一家公司也成为了二十世纪末泡沫经济的始作俑者。这家公司向投资者承诺了超乎想象的财富。这家公司声称重塑了整个金融体系。这家公司充分利用其无可挑剔的政治关系,一路攀升至牛市的顶峰。这家公司就是安然公司,它曾连续六年(1996-2001)被《财富》杂志评为美国最具创新力的公司。

The nineties seemed to some nervous observers uncannily like a re-run of the Roaring Twenties; and indeed the trajectory of the stock market in the 1990s was almost identical to that of the 1920s. Yet in some ways it was more like a rerun of the 1720s. What John Law’s Mississippi Company had been to the bubble that launched the eighteenth century, so another company would be to the bubble that ended the twentieth. It was a company that promised its investors wealth beyond their wildest imaginings. It was a company that claimed to have reinvented the entire financial system. And it was a company that took full advantage of its impeccable political connections to ride all the way to the top of the bull market. Named by Fortune magazine as America’s Most Innovative Company for six consecutive years (1996–2001), that company was Enron.


2001年11月,艾伦·格林斯潘荣获一项殊荣,与米哈伊尔·戈尔巴乔夫、科林·鲍威尔和纳尔逊·曼德拉等名人并列,成为该奖项的获得者之一。该奖项是安然杰出公共服务奖。格林斯潘当之无愧。从1995年2月到1999年6月,他只提高过一次美国利率。交易员们开始谈论“格林斯潘看跌期权”,因为让他执掌美联储就像在股市上拥有了一份“看跌期权”(一种选择权,但并非未来必须以理想价格出售股票的义务)。然而,自2000年1月中旬以来,美国股市一路暴跌,最终印证了格林斯潘早先关于非理性繁荣的警告。如同1987年的“黑色星期五”一样,纽约再次迎来了“黑色星期五”。事实上,随着美联储逐步降息,从6.5%降至2001年8月的3.5%,经济似乎即将软着陆;即便最坏的情况,也只是短暂的衰退。然而,毫无预兆地,纽约迎来了“黑色星期五”——但并非金融危机,而是两起蓄意坠机事件。在战争阴影笼罩和对1914年式市场崩溃的担忧中,格林斯潘再次下调利率,从3.5%降至3%,随后一路下调,直至2003年6月创下1%的历史新低。9·11事件后,美联储注入的流动性比曼哈顿所有消防车加起来还要多。但这也无力回天。2001年12月2日,就在格林斯潘领取安然奖两周后,该公司申请破产。

In November 2001, Alan Greenspan received a prestigious award, adding his name to a roll of honour that included Mikhail Gorbachev, Colin Powell and Nelson Mandela. The award was the Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service. Greenspan had certainly earned his accolade. From February 1995 until June 1999 he had raised US interest rates only once. Traders had begun to speak of the ‘Greenspan put’ because having him at the Fed was like having a ‘put’ option on the stock market (an option but not an obligation to sell stocks at a good price in the future). Since the middle of January 2000, however, the US stock market had been plummeting, belatedly vindicating Greenspan’s earlier warnings about irrational exuberance. There was no one Black Day, as in 1987. Indeed, as the Fed slashed rates, from 6.5 per cent down in steps to 3.5 per cent by August 2001, the economy looked like having a soft landing; at worst a very short recession. And then, quite without warning, a Black Day did dawn in New York – in the form not of a financial crash but of two deliberate plane crashes. Amid talk of war and fears of a 1914-style market shutdown, Greenspan slashed rates again, from 3.5 per cent to 3 per cent and then on down – and down – to an all-time low of 1 per cent in June 2003. More liquidity was pumped out by the Fed after 9/11 than by all the fire engines in Manhattan. But it could not save Enron. On 2 December 2001, just two weeks after Greenspan collected his Enron award, the company filed for bankruptcy.

约翰·劳(密西西比泡沫经济的始作俑者)和肯尼斯·莱(安然公司首席执行官)的职业生涯之间的相似之处,毫不夸张地说,令人震惊。约翰·劳的“点石成金”的秘诀是“用纸点金”,而肯尼斯·莱的“点石成金”则是“用天然气点金”。劳的计划是……莱伊的计划旨在彻底改变法国政府的财政状况。而他的计划则旨在彻底改变全球能源行业。多年来,能源行业一直由大型公用事业公司主导,这些公司既提供能源——输送天然气和发电——又将其出售给消费者。莱伊的宏伟构想,出自麦肯锡顾问杰弗里·K·斯基林之手,即创建一种能源银行,作为供应商和消费者之间的中介。103与劳一样,莱伊也出身于密苏里州一位贫穷牧师的儿子,他的创业之路也与安然公司类似,安然公司最初是内布拉斯加州奥马哈市一家小型天然气公司。正是莱伊将公司更名为安然,并将总部迁至德克萨斯州休斯顿。与劳一样,莱伊也拥有权贵人脉。作为德克萨斯州能源行业的长期盟友,老布什总统在1992年支持了一项旨在放松能源行业管制并取消政府价格控制的立法。安然公司660万美元的政治捐款中,约有四分之三流向了共和党,其中包括莱伊及其妻子在2000年大选中捐赠的35.5万美元。参议员菲尔·格拉姆是安然公司1996年竞选捐款的第二大受益人,也是加州能源放松管制的坚定支持者。

The resemblances between the careers of John Law, perpetrator of the Mississippi bubble, and Kenneth Lay, chief executive of Enron, are striking, to say the least. John Law’s philosopher’s stone had allowed him ‘to make gold out of paper’. Ken Lay’s equivalent was ‘to make gold out of gas’. Law’s plan had been to revolutionize French government finance. Lay’s was to revolutionize the global energy business. For years the industry had been dominated by huge utility companies that both physically provided the energy – pumped the gas and generated the electricity – and sold it on to consumers. Lay’s big idea, supplied by McKinsey consultant Jeffrey K. Skilling, was to create a kind of Energy Bank, which would act as the intermediary between suppliers and consumers.103 Like Law, Lay, the son of a poor Missouri preacher, had provincial beginnings – as did Enron, originally a small gas company in Omaha, Nebraska. It was Lay who renamed the company* and relocated its headquarters to Houston, Texas. Like Law, too, Lay had friends in high places. Himself a long-time ally of the Texan energy industry, President George H. W. Bush supported legislation in 1992 that deregulated the industry and removed government price controls. Around three quarters of Enron’s $6.6 million in political contributions went to the Republican Party, including $355,000 from Lay and his wife in the 2000 election. Senator Phil Gramm was Enron’s second-largest recipient of campaign contributions in 1996, and a strong proponent of Californian energy deregulation.

艾伦·格林斯潘和肯尼斯·莱

Alan Greenspan and Kenneth Lay

到2000年底,安然公司已成为美国第四大公司,拥有约21000名员工,控制着美国四分之一的天然气市场。凭借全球能源行业私有化的浪潮,该公司在世界各地迅速收购资产。仅在拉丁美洲,安然公司就在哥伦比亚、厄瓜多尔、秘鲁和玻利维亚拥有股份,并从玻利维亚铺设了一条横跨大陆通往巴西的天然气管道。据称,在乔治·W·布什的游说下,安然公司在阿根廷获得了修建通往智利的跨安第斯山脉天然气管道的合同。然而,最重要的是,安然公司的交易范围不仅限于能源,几乎涵盖了所有古代元素——土、水、火、气。它甚至声称可以交易互联网带宽。在一段宛如电影《骗中骗》般的场景中,银行分析师被安排参与虚假交易。员工们坐在电脑前,假装洽谈宽带业务,办公楼层一片混乱。这简直就是密西西比公司的翻版。就像1719年一样,投资者的回报似乎难以抗拒。1997年后的三年里,安然公司的股价上涨了近五倍,从每股不到20美元涨到了90多美元。对于那些获得丰厚股票期权“激励”的安然高管来说,回报更是巨大。在安然公司倒闭的最后一年,其140位高管平均每人获得了530万美元的薪酬。豪华汽车的销量飙升,休斯顿最尊贵的社区河橡树区的房产价格也水涨船高。“我仔细想过这个问题,”1997年成为安然首席运营官的斯基林说道,“一切都只关乎金钱……用金钱就能买到忠诚。这些感性的东西远不如现金重要。现金才是驱动业绩的动力。” 104 “在安然公司,你能拿到相当于年基本工资好几倍的奖金,”谢伦·沃特金斯回忆道。当时我在休斯顿安然公司已不复存在的总部外见到她。“如果你只拿到百分比的奖金,哪怕是年基本工资的75%,你也不会被重视。哦,你拿到的是百分比。你想要的是倍数的奖金。你想要两倍、三倍、四倍的年基本工资作为奖金。” 105在1999年4月的狂热氛围中,休斯顿太空人队甚至将他们的球场更名为安然球场。

By the end of 2000, Enron was America’s fourth-largest company, employing around 21,000 people. It controlled a quarter of the US natural gas business. Riding a global wave of energy sector privatization, the company snapped up assets all over the world. In Latin America alone the company had interests in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, from where Enron laid its pipeline across the continent to Brazil. In Argentina, allegedly after lobbying by George W. Bush, Enron had secured the contract to build the trans-Andean natural gas line to Chile. Above all, however, Enron traded, not only in energy but in virtually all the ancient elements of earth, water, fire and air. It even claimed that it could trade in Internet bandwidth. In a scene straight out of The Sting, bank analysts were escorted through fake trading floors where employees sat in front of computers pretending to do broadband deals. It was the Mississippi Company all over again. And, just as in 1719, the rewards to investors seemed irresistible. In the three years after 1997, Enron’s stock price increased by a factor of nearly five, from less than $20 a share to more than $90. For Enron executives, who were generously ‘incentivized’ with share options, the rewards were greater still. In the final year of its existence Enron paid its top 140 executives an average of $5.3 million each. Luxury car sales went through the roof. So did properties in River Oaks, Houston’s most exclusive neighbourhood. ‘I’ve thought about this a lot,’ remarked Skilling, who became Enron chief operating officer in 1997, ‘and all that matters is money . . . You buy loyalty with money. This touchy-feely stuff isn’t as important as cash. That’s what drives performance.’104 ‘You got multiples of your annual base pay at Enron,’ Sherron Watkins recalled when I met her outside the now defunct Enron headquarters in Houston. ‘You were really less thought of if you got a percentage, even if it was 75 per cent of your annual base pay. Oh, you were getting a percentage. You wanted multiples. You wanted two times your annual base pay, three times, four times your annual base pay, as a bonus.’105 In the euphoria of April 1999, the Houston Astros even renamed their ballpark Enron Field.

唯一的问题是,就像约翰·劳的“系统”一样,安然的“系统”也是一场精心策划的骗局,建立在市场操纵和虚假账目之上。在2004年公开的录音带中,可以听到安然的交易员要求埃尔帕索电力公司停产以维持电价。另一段对话则提到了“你们从加州那些可怜的老奶奶们那里偷走的所有钱”。这种操纵的结果不仅是安然想要的更高电价,还导致了消费者的停电。在放松管制法生效后的短短六个月内,加州就经历了不下38次轮流停电。(在另一段录音中,交易员们观看加州森林火灾的电视报道时,随着电线杆的弯曲和倒塌,高喊着“烧吧,宝贝,烧吧!”)即使有这样的手段,安然仍然无法阻止加州的电力危机蔓延。通过操纵市场,该公司申报的资产和利润被大幅夸大,而其债务和亏损则被隐藏在所谓的特殊目的实体(SPE)中,这些实体并未纳入公司的合并报表。每个季度,公司高管都不得不使出浑身解数,将实际亏损粉饰成巨额利润。斯基林利用诸如市值计价会计和债务证券化等新型金融技术,一路攀升至顶峰。但即便首席财务官安德鲁·法斯托也无法无限期地将亏损粉饰成利润,尤其是在他开始利用像切科投资公司(Chewco Investments)这样名副其实的特殊目的实体为自己和其他高管中饱私囊之后。到了20世纪90年代中期,安然公司的国际业务尤其亏损严重,其中最引人注目的是取消了印度马哈拉施特拉邦的一个大型发电项目。安然在线(EnronOnline)是第一个基于网络的商品交易系统,交易量很高;但它真的盈利了吗?在休斯顿,欣喜若狂的气氛开始消退;内部人士开始感受到最初的不安。法斯托的特殊目的实体(SPE)被赋予了越来越不祥的名字:猛禽一号(Raptor I)、利爪(Talon)。趁着形势一片大好,他和一些人偷偷抛售了价值9.24亿美元的安然股票。

The only problem was that, like John Law’s System, the Enron ‘System’ was an elaborate fraud, based on market manipulation and cooked books. In tapes that became public in 2004, Enron traders can be heard asking the El Paso Electric Company to shut down production in order to maintain prices. Another exchange concerns ‘all the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers of California’. The results of such machinations were not only the higher prices Enron wanted, but also blackouts for consumers. In the space of just six months after the deregulation law came into effect, California experienced no fewer than thirty-eight rolling blackouts. (In another tape, traders watching television reports of Californian forest fires shout ‘Burn, baby, burn!’ as electricity pylons buckle and fall.) Even with such market-rigging, the company’s stated assets and profits were vastly inflated, while its debts and losses were concealed in so-called special-purpose entities (SPEs) which were not included in the company’s consolidated statements. Each quarter the company’s executives had to use more smoke and more mirrors to make actual losses look like bumper profits. Skilling had risen to the top by exploiting new financial techniques like mark-to-market accounting and debt securitization. But not even chief finance officer Andrew Fastow could massage losses into profits indefinitely, especially as he was now using SPEs like the aptly named Chewco Investments to line his and other executives’ pockets. Enron’s international business, in particular, was haemorrhaging money by the mid-1990s, most spectacularly after the cancellation of a major power generation project in the Indian state of Maharashtra. EnronOnline, the first web-based commodity-trading system, had a high turnover; but did it make any money? In Houston, the euphoria was fading; the insiders were feeling the first symptoms of distress. Fastow’s SPEs were being given increasingly ominous names: Raptor I, Talon. He and others surreptitiously unloaded $924 million of Enron shares while the going was good.

投资者曾被告知安然股价很快就会达到100美元。然而,2001年8月14日,斯基林(Skilling)以“个人原因”为由意外宣布辞职,股价随即暴跌至40美元以下。同月,谢伦·沃特金斯(Sherron Watkins)致信莱伊(Lay),表达了她对安然“在一系列会计丑闻中崩溃”的担忧。而事实也正是如此。10月16日,安然公布第三季度亏损6.18亿美元,股东权益减少12亿美元。八天后,在证券交易委员会(SEC)的调查进行之际,法斯托(Fastow)辞去了首席财务官(CFO)的职务。11月8日,公司被迫修改过去五年的利润数据;结果显示,虚报的利润高达5.67亿美元。 12 月 2 日,安然公司申请破产时,人们发现经审计的资产负债表低估了该公司 250 亿美元的长期债务:实际上不是 130 亿美元,而是 380 亿美元。此时,痛苦已转变为厌恶;恐慌紧随其后。到2001年底,安然公司的股票价值仅剩30美分。

Investors had been assured that Enron’s stock price would soon hit $100. When (for ‘personal reasons’) Skilling unexpectedly announced his resignation on 14 August 2001, however, the price tumbled to below $40. That same month, Sherron Watkins wrote to Lay to express her fear that Enron would ‘implode in a wave of accounting scandals’. This was precisely what happened. On 16 October Enron reported a $618 million third-quarter loss and a $1.2 billion reduction in shareholder equity. Eight days later, with a Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry pending, Fastow stepped down as CFO. On 8 November the company was obliged to revise its profits for the preceding five years; the overstatement was revealed to be $567 million. When Enron filed for bankruptcy on 2 December, it was revealed that the audited balance sheet had understated the company’s long-term debt by $25 billion: it was in fact not $13 billion but $38 billion. By now, distress had turned to revulsion; and panic was hard on its heels. By the end of 2001 Enron shares were worth just 30 cents.

2006年5月,莱伊被判犯有全部十项指控,包括共谋、虚假陈述、证券欺诈和银行欺诈。斯基林被判犯有27项指控中的18项。莱伊在科罗拉多州阿斯彭度假期间,于宣判前去世。斯基林被判处24年零4个月监禁,并被勒令向安然养老基金偿还2600万美元;目前他正在上诉。总共有16人对与安然相关的指控认罪,另有5人(截至目前)在审判中被判有罪。安然公司的审计机构安达信会计师事务所也因这场丑闻而破产。然而,最大的受害者是普通员工和小股东,他们的积蓄化为乌有,就像密西西比河空难中损失的数百万里弗尔一样,最终化为乌有。

In May 2006 Lay was found guilty of all ten of the charges against him, including conspiracy, false statements, securities fraud and bank fraud. Skilling was found guilty on 18 out of 27 counts. Lay died before sentencing while on holiday in Aspen, Colorado. Skilling was sentenced to 24 years and 4 months in prison and ordered to repay $26 million to the Enron pension fund; an appeal is pending. All told, sixteen people pled guilty to Enron-related charges and five others (so far) have been found guilty at trial. The firm’s auditors, Arthur Andersen, were destroyed by the scandal. The principal losers, however, were the ordinary employees and small shareholders whose savings went up in smoke, turned into mere ‘wind’, just like the millions of livres lost in the Mississippi crash.


股份制有限责任公司诞生于近四百年前,的确是一项奇迹般的制度,正如股票市场一样,其所有权可以在股票市场中买卖。然而,纵观金融史,不乏不法公司,正如不理性的市场一样。事实上,两者相辅相成——因为正是在牛市最为狂热的时候,人们最容易被蒙蔽。然而,中央银行家几乎总是扮演着至关重要的角色,他们本应是掌控市场走向的“牛仔”。显然,如果没有皇家银行,劳不可能取得他那样的成就。同样显而易见的是,如果没有美联储在20世纪90年代的宽松货币政策,肯·莱和杰夫·斯基林也很难将安然公司的股价推高到90美元。相比之下,大萧条则为我们提供了一个惨痛的教训,让我们认识到在股市崩盘期间过度紧缩的货币政策会带来怎样的危险。避免重蹈大萧条的覆辙有时被视为不择手段的目标。然而,荷兰东印度公司的历史,原始股份公司表明,有了阿姆斯特丹交易所银行提供的这种健全货币,就可以避免股市泡沫和崩盘。

Invented almost exactly four hundred years ago, the joint-stock, limited-liability company is indeed a miraculous institution, as is the stock market where its ownership can be bought and sold. And yet throughout financial history there have been crooked companies, just as there have been irrational markets. Indeed the two go hand in hand – for it is when the bulls are stampeding most enthusiastically that people are most likely to get taken for the proverbial ride. A crucial role, however, is nearly always played by central bankers, who are supposed to be the cowboys in control of the herd. Clearly, without his Banque Royale, Law could never have achieved what he did. Equally clearly, without the loose money policy of the Federal Reserve in the 1990s, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling would have struggled to crank up the price of Enron stock to $90. By contrast, the Great Depression offers a searing lesson in the dangers of excessively restrictive monetary policy during a stock market crash. Avoiding a repeat of the Great Depression is sometimes seen as an end that justifies any means. Yet the history of the Dutch East India Company, the original joint-stock company, shows that, with sound money of the sort provided by the Amsterdam Exchange Bank, stock market bubbles and busts can be avoided.

最终,金融市场的走势永远不会像我们希望的那样一帆风顺。只要人们对未来的预期在过度乐观和过度悲观之间摇摆不定——在贪婪和恐惧之间摇摆不定——股价就往往会走上一条曲折蜿蜒的道路;事实上,它就像安第斯山脉的嶙峋山峰一样起伏不定。作为投资者,你只能祈祷,当你不得不从极度兴奋的巅峰跌落时,那将是一条平坦的滑雪道,而不是悬崖峭壁。

In the end, the path of financial markets can never be as smooth as we might like. So long as human expectations of the future veer from the over-optimistic to the over-pessimistic – from greed to fear – stock prices will tend to trace an erratic path; indeed, a line not unlike the jagged peaks of the Andes. As an investor you just have to hope that, when you have to come down from the summit of euphoria, it will be on a smooth ski-slope and not over a sheer cliff.

但是,我们真的就没有什么办法来保护自己免受现实和比喻意义上的冲击吗?正如我们将在第四章中看到的,保险业从十八世纪的简陋起源发展至今,已经衍生出一系列应对这一问题的方案,每一种方案都至少能为我们提供一些保护,使我们免受金融史上那些陡峭悬崖和巨大波动的影响。

But is there nothing we can do to protect ourselves from real and metaphorical falls? As we shall see in Chapter 4, the evolution of insurance, from humble eighteenth-century beginnings, has created a range of answers to that question, each of which offers at least some protection from the sheer cliffs and fat tails of financial history.

4

4

风险的回归

The Return of Risk

最基本的理财冲动就是为未来储蓄,因为未来变幻莫测。世界充满危险。我们大多数人一生中都会遭遇一些厄运,有些人甚至厄运连连。很多时候,这只是因为在错误的时间出现在了错误的地点:就像2005年8月最后一周的密西西比河三角洲,当时卡特里娜飓风两次袭击了那里。首先是时速高达140英里的狂风,将该地区许多木屋从混凝土地基上吹走。两个小时后,高达30英尺的风暴潮冲破了保护新奥尔良免受庞恰特雷恩湖和密西西比河侵袭的三座堤坝,数百万加仑的洪水涌入这座城市。真是时运不济。就像 2001 年 9 月 11 日的世界贸易中心一样。或者自 2003 年美国入侵以来,几乎每天都会发生的巴格达事件。或者旧金山,当——就像它终有一天会经历的那样——圣安德烈亚斯断层发生大地震时。

The most basic financial impulse of all is to save for the future, because the future is so unpredictable. The world is a dangerous place. Not many of us get through life without having a little bad luck. Some of us end up having a lot. Often, it’s just a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time: like the Mississippi delta in the last week of August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina struck not once but twice. First there was the howling 140-mile-an-hour wind that blew many of the area’s wooden houses clean off their concrete foundations. Then, two hours later, came the thirty-foot storm surge that breached three of the levees that protect New Orleans from Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi, pouring millions of gallons of water into the city. Wrong place, wrong time. Like the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. Or Baghdad on pretty much any day since the US invasion of 2003. Or San Francisco when – as it one day will – a really big earthquake occurs along the San Andreas fault.

正如前国防部长唐纳德·拉姆斯菲尔德在萨达姆·侯赛因政权被推翻后,伊拉克首都爆发了大规模抢劫事件时漫不经心地评论的那样,“世事难料”。有些人认为,由于气候变化、恐怖主义抬头或美国外交政策失误的反噬,这类事件发生的可能性比以往任何时候都高。问题是,我们该如何应对未来的风险和不确定性?个人是否应该承担防范不幸的责任?我们是否应该依赖同胞的自愿捐助?当事情变得糟糕透顶时,人类应该如何自救?还是我们应该指望国家——换句话说,指望我们纳税人的强制性缴款——在灾难来临时拯救我们?

Stuff happens, as the former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insouciantly observed after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein unleashed an orgy of looting in the Iraqi capital. Some people argue that such stuff is more likely to happen than in the past, whether because of climate change, the rise of terrorism or the blowback from American foreign policy blunders. The question is, how do we deal with the risks and uncertainties of the future? Does the onus fall on the individual to insure against misfortune? Should we rely on the voluntary charity of our fellow human beings when things go horribly wrong? Or should we be able to count on the state – in other words on the compulsory contributions of our fellow taxpayers – to bail us out when the flood comes?

风险管理的历史,就是一场漫长的斗争:一方面是我们渴望财务安全的虚荣心——比如像苏格兰寡妇那样安稳——另一方面是残酷的现实:根本不存在所谓的“未来”,它并非单一不变。存在的只有无数个不可预见的未来,它们永远都有可能让我们措手不及。

The history of risk management is one long struggle between our vain desire to be financially secure – as secure as, say, a Scottish widow – and the hard reality that there really is no such thing as ‘the future’, singular. There are only multiple, unforeseeable futures, which will never lose their capacity to take us by surprise.

大不安

The Big Uneasy

小时候看的西部片里,我常常被那些鬼城迷住。那些短暂存在的定居点,因为美国边疆的快速变迁而被遗弃。直到卡特里娜飓风过后,我去了新奥尔良,才亲眼目睹了很可能成为美国第一座鬼城的地方。

In the Westerns I watched as a boy I was fascinated by ghost towns, short-lived settlements that had been left behind by the fast pace of change on the American frontier. It was not until I went to New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina that I encountered what could very well become America’s first ghost city.

我对“大快活城”(新奥尔良的别称)有着美好却模糊的记忆。十几岁时,正值中学和大学之间的过渡期,我初尝自由的滋味,发现这里几乎是美国唯一一个未成年也能喝到啤酒的地方,这让我觉得保护厅里那些老爵士乐手们的演奏简直棒极了。二十五年过去了,距离那场大风暴袭击也过去了近两年,这座城市已然失去了往日的荣光,只剩下凄凉的影子。圣伯纳德教区是受灾最严重的地区之一。在约26000户人家中,只有5户幸免于难。卡特里娜飓风共夺去了1836名美国人的生命,其中绝大多数来自路易斯安那州。仅在圣伯纳德教区,就有47人丧生。你仍然可以在废弃房屋的门上看到标记,表明屋内是否曾发现过尸体。这不禁让人联想起中世纪黑死病肆虐的英格兰。

I had happy if hazy memories of the ‘Big Easy’. As a teenager between school and university, savouring my first taste of freedom, I discovered it was about the only place in the United States where I could get served beer despite being underage, which certainly made the geriatric jazz musicians in Preservation Hall sound good. Twenty-five years on, and nearly two years after the great storm struck, the city is a forlorn shadow of its former self. Saint Bernard Parish was one of the districts that was worst affected by the storm. Only five homes out of around 26,000 were not flooded. In all, 1,836 Americans lost their lives as a result of Katrina, of whom the overwhelming majority were from Louisiana. In Saint Bernard alone, the death toll was forty-seven. You can still see the symbols on the doors of abandoned houses, indicating whether or not a corpse was found inside. It invites comparison with medieval England at the time of the Black Death.

2007年6月我重访新奥尔良时,市议员乔伊·迪法塔和圣伯纳德市政府的其他工作人员仍在他们被洪水冲毁的旧办公楼后面的拖车里办公。风暴期间,迪法塔一直坚守在办公桌前,随着水位不断上涨,他最终退到了屋顶。在那里,他和同事们只能眼睁睁地看着他们挚爱的社区被污浊的洪水吞噬,却无能为力。他们对联邦紧急事务管理局(FEMA)的无能感到愤怒,决心重建家园。从那时起,他们就孜孜不倦地努力重建这个曾经紧密团结的社区(他们中的许多人,像迪法塔本人一样,都是从加那利群岛来到路易斯安那州的移民的后裔)。然而,说服成千上万的难民返回圣伯纳德并非易事;两年过去了,该教区的人口仍然只有卡特里娜飓风前的三分之一。而造成这一问题的主要原因之一,竟然是保险。如今,在圣伯纳德和新奥尔良其他地势低洼的地区为房屋投保几乎是不可能的。如果没有房屋保险,几乎不可能获得抵押贷款。

When I revisited New Orleans in June 2007, Councilman Joey DiFatta and the rest of Saint Bernard’s municipal government were still working in trailers behind their old office building, which the flood gutted. DiFatta stayed at his desk during the storm, eventually retreating to the roof as the waters kept rising. From there, he and his colleagues could only watch helplessly as their beloved neighbourhood vanished under filthy brown water. Angered by what they saw as the incompetence of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), they resolved to restore what had been lost. Since then, they have worked tirelessly to try to rebuild what was once a tightly knit community (many of whom, like DiFatta himself, are descended from settlers who came to Louisiana from the Canary Islands). But persuading thousands of refugees to come back to Saint Bernard has proved far from easy; two years later the parish still has only one third of its pre-Katrina population. A large part of the problem turns out to be insurance. Today, insuring a house in Saint Bernard and other low-lying parts of New Orleans is virtually impossible. And without buildings insurance, it is virtually impossible to get a mortgage.

卡特里娜飓风后的新奥尔良:保险失效之处

New Orleans after Katrina: where insurance failed

卡特里娜飓风几乎摧毁了新奥尔良市四分之三的房屋,几乎所有幸存者都失去了财产。财产和意外伤害索赔高达175万起,保险损失估计超过410亿美元,使卡特里娜飓风成为美国现代史上损失最惨重的灾难。 1但卡特里娜飓风不仅淹没了新奥尔良,也暴露了保险体系的缺陷。该体系将责任划分为两部分:一部分是提供风灾保障的私人保险公司,另一部分是提供洪水保障的联邦政府。这一体系是在1965年贝齐飓风之后引入的。2005年灾难过后,数千名保险公司评估员涌入路易斯安那州和密西西比州沿海地区。许多居民反映,他们的工作并非帮助受灾的投保人,而是通过声称房屋损失是由洪水而非风灾造成的来避免赔付。*保险公司没有料到他们的一位保单持有人,前美国海军飞行员兼著名律师理查德·F·斯克鲁格斯,他曾被称为“侵权诉讼之王”。

Nearly all the survivors of Katrina lost property in the disaster, since nearly three quarters of the city’s total housing stock were damaged. There were no fewer than 1.75 million property and casualty claims, with estimated insurance losses in excess of $41 billion, making Katrina the costliest catastrophe in modern American history.1 But Katrina not only submerged New Orleans. It also laid bare the defects of a system of insurance that divided responsibility between private insurance companies, which offered protection against wind damage, and the federal government, which offered protection against flooding, under a scheme that had been introduced after Hurricane Betsy in 1965. In the aftermath of the 2005 disaster, thousands of insurance company assessors fanned out along the Louisiana and Mississippi coastline. According to many residents, their job was not to help stricken policy-holders but to avoid paying out to them by asserting that the damage their properties had suffered was due to flooding and not to wind.* The insurance companies did not reckon with one of their policy-holders, former US Navy pilot and celebrity lawyer Richard F. Scruggs, the man once known as the King of Torts.

“迪基”·斯克鲁格斯在20世纪80年代首次登上新闻头条,当时他代表因接触石棉而肺部严重受损的造船厂工人,最终赢得了5000万美元的和解金。但这与他后来的收入相比只是九牛一毛。烟草公司向密西西比州和其他45个州支付了超过2000亿美元的赔偿金,用于补偿因烟草相关疾病而产生的医疗补助费用。这起案件(因电影《惊爆内幕》而名垂青史)让斯克鲁格斯一夜暴富。据说,他在烟草集体诉讼案中的律师费高达14亿美元,相当于他的律师事务所每小时收费22500美元。他用这笔钱在帕斯卡古拉海滩大道购置了一栋海滨别墅,从他在密西西比州牛津的办公室到那里只需很短的车程(当然是乘坐私人飞机)。卡特里娜飓风过后,这栋房子只剩下一个混凝土地基和几面损毁严重的墙壁,不得不被推土机夷为平地。虽然他的保险公司(明智地)支付了赔偿金,但斯克鲁格斯得知其他投保人的遭遇后感到非常失望。他主动提出代理的案件中,包括他的妹夫、前参议院共和党多数党领袖特伦特·洛特,以及他的朋友、密西西比州众议员吉恩·泰勒。这两人都在卡特里娜飓风中失去了家园,却都遭到了保险公司的敷衍对待。 2在一系列代表投保人的案件中,斯克鲁格斯指控保险公司(主要是州立农场保险公司和好事达保险公司)试图逃避其法律义务。 3他和他的“斯克鲁格斯卡特里娜小组”进行了详细的气象研究,结果表明,像帕斯卡古拉这样的地方几乎所有的损失都是由洪水来袭前几个小时的强风造成的。此外,还有两名保险理赔员向斯克鲁格斯举报,他们声称自己所在的公司篡改了报告,将损失归咎于洪水而非强风。保险公司在2005年和2006年创纪录的利润更加激起了斯克鲁格斯寻求赔偿的决心。正如我们在他家曾经所在的那片荒地上见面时他告诉我的那样:“这个小镇是我生活了五十年的家;我在这里养育了我的家人;我为此感到自豪。看到如今的景象,我难免有些伤感。” 那时,州立农场保险公司已经解决了640起由……提起的诉讼。斯克鲁格斯代表那些最初被拒赔的客户,支付了8000万美元;并同意审查另外36000起索赔。4看起来保险公司似乎正在退缩。然而,斯克鲁格斯对抗保险公司的行动在2007年11月宣告失败,当时他、他的儿子扎卡里和三名同伙因涉嫌在卡特里娜飓风相关法律费用纠纷案中试图贿赂州法院法官而被起诉。*斯克鲁格斯现在面临最高五年的监禁。5

‘Dickie’ Scruggs first hit the headlines in the 1980s, when he represented shipyard workers whose lungs had been fatally damaged by exposure to asbestos, winning a $50 million settlement. But that was small change compared with what he later made the tobacco companies pay: over $200 billion to Mississippi and forty-five other states as compensation for Medicaid costs arising from tobacco-related illnesses. The case (immortalized in the film The Insider) made Scruggs a rich man. His fee in the tobacco class action is said to have been $1.4 billion, or $22,500 for every hour his law firm worked. It was money he used to acquire a waterfront house on Pascagoula’s Beach Boulevard, a short commute (by private jet, naturally) from his Oxford, Mississippi, offices. All that remained of that house after Katrina was a concrete base plus a few ruined walls so badly damaged that they had to be bulldozed. Although his insurance company (wisely) paid out, Scruggs was dismayed to hear of the treatment of other policy-holders. Among those he offered to represent was his brother-in-law Trent Lott, the former Republican majority leader in the Senate, and his friend Mississippi Congressman Gene Taylor, both of whom had also lost homes to Katrina and had received short shrift from their insurers.2 In a series of cases on behalf of policy-holders, Scruggs alleged that the insurers (principally State Farm and All State) were trying to renege on their legal obligations.3 He and his ‘Scruggs Katrina Group’ conducted detailed meteorological research to show that nearly all the damage in places like Pascagoula was caused by the wind, hours before the floodwaters struck. Scruggs was also approached by two whistle-blowing insurance adjusters, who claimed the company they worked for had altered reports in order to attribute damage to flooding rather than wind. The insurance companies’ record profits in 2005 and 2006 only whetted Scruggs’s appetite for redress.* As he told me when we met in the wasteland where his house used to stand: ‘This [town] was home for fifty years; where I raised my family; what I was proud of. It makes me somewhat emotional when I see this.’ By that time, State Farm had already settled 640 cases brought by Scruggs on behalf of clients whose claims had initially been turned down, paying out $80 million; and had agreed to review 36,000 other claims.4 It seemed as if the insurers were retreating. Scruggs’s campaign against them collapsed in November 2007, however, when he, his son Zachary and three associates were indicted on charges of trying to bribe a state-court judge in a case arising from a dispute over Katrina-related legal fees.* Scruggs now faces a prison sentence of up to five years.5

这听起来或许又是一个南方道德沦丧的故事——或者说,又一个“以侵权为生,以侵权为死”的例证。然而,无论斯克鲁格斯如何从好人堕落成恶棍,事实依然是,州立农场保险公司和好事达保险公司如今都已宣布墨西哥湾沿岸的大片区域为“无保险区”。在自然灾害频发、灾后保险公司还要应对像迪基·斯克鲁格斯这样的人的地方,为什么要冒着风险续保呢?这似乎强烈暗示着,为帕斯卡古拉和圣伯纳德等地的居民提供保险,已不再是私营部门愿意承担的责任。然而,美国立法者是否准备好承担进一步扩大公共保险范围所带来的责任,目前还远未可知。 2005年飓风造成的未投保损失总额可能最终将使联邦政府至少花费1090亿美元用于灾后援助,并支付80亿美元的税收减免,几乎是估计保险损失的三倍。 6据娜奥米·克莱恩称,这是功能失调的“灾难资本主义复合体”的症状,这种复合体为一部分人创造了私人利润,却让其他人蒙受损失。纳税人将承担灾难的真正成本。7面对如此巨额的账单,正确的做法是什么?当保险失效时,唯一的选择是否实际上就是将所有自然灾害国有化——这将给政府带来巨大的、无止境的债务

It may sound like just another story of Southern moral laxity – or proof that those who live by the tort, die by the tort. Yet, regardless of Scruggs’s descent from good fellow to bad felon, the fact remains that both State Farm and All State have now declared a large part of the Gulf of Mexico coast a ‘no insurance’ zone. Why risk renewing policies here, where natural disasters happen all too often and where, after the disaster, companies have to contend with the likes of Dickie Scruggs? The strong implication would seem to be that providing coverage to the inhabitants of places like Pascagoula and Saint Bernard is no longer something the private sector is prepared to do. Yet it is far from clear that American legislators are ready to take on the liabilities implied by a further extension of public insurance. Total non-insured damages arising from hurricanes in 2005 are likely to end up costing the federal government at least $109 billion in post-disaster assistance and $8 billion in tax relief, nearly three times the estimated insurance losses.6 According to Naomi Klein, this is symptomatic of a dysfunctional ‘Disaster Capitalism Complex’, which generates private profits for some, but leaves taxpayers to foot the true costs of catastrophe.7 In the face of such ruinous bills, what is the right way to proceed? When insurance fails, is the only alternative, in effect, to nationalize all natural disasters – creating a huge open-ended liability for governments?


当然,生活从来都充满危险。飓风一直存在,正如战争、瘟疫和饥荒也一直存在一样。灾难既可以是小到私人的,也可以是大到公共的。每天都有人生病或受伤,突然间无法工作。我们都会变老,失去谋生的力气。少数不幸的人天生就无法自理。迟早我们都会死去,往往会留下一个或多个需要依靠的人。关键在于,这些灾难很少是随机事件。飓风的发生频率与疾病和死亡的发生频率一样,具有一定的规律性。自19世纪50年代以来,每个十年美国都会遭受1到10次大型飓风的袭击(大型飓风的定义是风速超过110英里/小时,风暴潮超过8英尺)。目前尚不清楚本十年是否会打破20世纪40年代的记录,当时发生了10次这样的飓风。8由于有涵盖一个半世纪的数据,因此可以对飓风的发生频率和规模赋予概率。美国陆军工程兵团将卡特里娜飓风描述为1/396的风暴,这意味着在任何一年中,如此规模的飓风袭击美国的概率为0.25%。9风险管理解决方案公司则持截然不同的观点,该公司在卡特里娜飓风登陆前几周就判断其规模是40年一遇的事件。10这些不同的评估表明,与地震和战争一样,飓风可能更多地属于不确定性范畴,而非已被充分理解的风险范畴。*对于大多数情况此类概率可以更精确地计算出来。人们面临的其他风险主要是因为发生频率更高,所以更容易辨别统计规律。据估计,美国人一生中因自然因素(包括各种自然灾害)而死亡的平均风险为1/3288。因建筑物火灾而死亡的相应概率为1/1358。美国人被枪杀的概率为1/314。但他们自杀的可能性更高(1/119);死于致命交通事故的可能性更高(1/78);而死于癌症的可能性最大(1/5)。 11

Of course, life has always been dangerous. There have always been hurricanes, just as there have always been wars, plagues and famines. And disasters can be small private affairs as well as big public ones. Every day, men and women fall ill or are injured and suddenly can no longer work. We all get old and lose the strength to earn our daily bread. An unlucky few are born unable to fend for themselves. And sooner or later we all die, often leaving one or more dependants behind us. The key point is that few of these calamities are random events. The incidence of hurricanes has a certain regularity like the incidence of disease and death. In every decade since the 1850s the United States has been struck by between one and ten major hurricanes (defined as a storm with wind speeds above 110 mph and a storm surge above 8 feet). It is not yet clear that the present decade will beat the record of the 1940s, which saw ten such hurricanes.8 Because there are data covering a century and a half, it is possible to attach probabilities to the incidence and scale of hurricanes. The US Army Corps of Engineers described Hurricane Katrina as a 1-in-396 storm, meaning that there is a 0.25 per cent chance of such a large hurricane striking the United States in any given year.9 A rather different view was taken by the company Risk Management Solutions, which judged a Katrina-sized hurricane to be a once-in-forty-years event just a few weeks before the storm struck.10 These different assessments indicate that, like earthquakes and wars, hurricanes may belong more in the realm of uncertainty than of risk properly understood.* Such probabilities can be calculated with greater precision for most of the other risks that people face mainly because they are more frequent, so statistical patterns are easier to discern. The average American’s lifetime risk of death from exposure to forces of nature, including all kinds of natural disaster, has been estimated at 1 in 3,288. The equivalent figure for death due to a fire in a building is 1 in 1,358. The odds of the average American being shot to death are 1 in 314. But he or she is even more likely to commit suicide (1 in 119); more likely still to die in a fatal road accident (1 in 78); and most likely of all to die of cancer (1 in 5).11

在前现代农业社会,几乎每个人都面临着因营养不良或疾病而过早死亡的巨大风险,更不用说战争了。当时的人们在预防方面远不如后世。他们更多地依赖于祈求神灵庇佑,他们认为神灵决定着饥荒、瘟疫和入侵的发生。人们直到很久以后才意识到天气、作物产量和传染病等可测量规律的重要性。直到十八、十九世纪,他们才开始系统地记录降雨量、收成和死亡率,从而能够进行概率计算。然而,即便在此之前,他们也明白储蓄的智慧:为所谓的(在农业社会中更是实实在在的)极端困境积攒资金。大多数原始社会至少都会尝试囤积食物和其他物资,以度过难关。我们这个部落物种从远古时期就凭直觉领悟到资源共享的道理,因为人多势众才能真正保障安全。鉴于我们祖先长期处于弱势地位,最早的保险形式很可能是丧葬互助会,它们会预留资金以确保部落成员能够得到体面的安葬。(在东非一些最贫困的地区,这类互助会至今仍是唯一的金融机构。)未雨绸缪,为未来可能发生的逆境提前储蓄,仍然是保险的基本原则,无论是为了应对死亡、衰老、疾病还是意外。关键在于要知道应该储蓄多少,以及如何使用这些储蓄,才能确保,不像新奥尔良那样……卡特里娜,资金储备足以应对灾难发生时的损失。但要做到这一点,你需要比平时更加​​精明。而这恰恰为我们揭示了保险业的起源。除了美丽而精明的苏格兰,还能是哪里呢?

In pre-modern agricultural societies, nearly everyone was at substantial risk from premature death due to malnutrition or disease, to say nothing of war. People in those days could do much less than later generations in the way of prophylaxis. They relied much more on seeking to propitiate the gods or God who, they conjectured, determined the incidence of famines, plagues and invasions. Only slowly did men appreciate the significance of measurable regularities in the weather, crop yields and infections. Only very belatedly – in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – did they begin systematically to record rainfall, harvests and mortality in a way that made probabilistic calculation possible. Yet, even before they did so, they understood the wisdom of saving: putting money aside for the proverbial (and in agricultural societies literal) extreme rainy day. Most primitive societies at least attempt to hoard food and other provisions to tide them over in hard times. And our tribal species intuitively grasped from the earliest times that it makes sense to pool resources, since there is genuine safety in numbers. Appropriately, given our ancestors’ chronic vulnerability, the earliest forms of insurance were probably burial societies, which set aside resources to guarantee a tribe member a decent interment. (Such societies remain the only form of financial institution in some of the poorest parts of East Africa.) Saving in advance of probable future adversity remains the fundamental principle of insurance, whether it is against death, the effects of old age, sickness or accident. The trick is knowing how much to save and what to do with those savings to ensure that, unlike in New Orleans after Katrina, there is enough money in the kitty to cover the costs of catastrophe when it strikes. But to do that, you need to be more than usually canny. And that provides an important clue as to just where the history of insurance had its origins. Where else but in bonny, canny Scotland?

寻找掩护

Taking Cover

人们常说我们苏格兰人悲观。或许这与天气有关——那些阴沉沉的雨天。或许是因为多年来体育赛事上的挫败感。又或许是因为像我家这样的低地居民在宗教改革时期信奉了加尔文主义。预定论并非什么令人振奋的信仰,尽管全知全能的上帝早已知道我们当中哪些人(“蒙拣选者”)会上天堂,哪些人(数量更多的是无可救药的罪人)会下地狱,这种假设看似合乎逻辑。无论出于何种原因,两位苏格兰教会的牧师理应获得赞誉,因为他们在两百五十多年前的1744年创立了第一个真正意义上的保险基金。

They say we Scots are a pessimistic people. Maybe it has to do with the weather – all those dreary, rainy days. Maybe it’s the endless years of sporting disappointment. Or maybe it was the Calvinism that Lowlanders like my family embraced at the time of the Reformation. Predestination is not an especially cheering article of faith, logical though it may be to assume that an omniscient God already knows which of us (‘the Elect’) will go to heaven, and which of us (a rather larger number of hopeless sinners) will go to hell. For whatever reason, two Church of Scotland ministers deserve the credit for inventing the first true insurance fund more than two hundred and fifty years ago, in 1744.

保险公司的确在此日期之前就已经存在。“船底保险”(Bottomry)——即商船船底(船体)的保险——是保险作为商业分支的起源。有人认为,最早的保险合同可以追溯到14世纪初的意大利,当时商业文件中开始出现“securitas” (安全保障)的支付方式。但这些安排最早更像是向商人提供的有条件贷款(如同古巴比伦时期那样),一旦发生意外,贷款就会被取消,而非现代意义上的保单;在《威尼斯商人》中,安东尼奥的“argosies”(货船)明显没有投保,这使他面临夏洛克的谋杀威胁。直到14世纪50年代,真正的保险合同才开始出现,保费通常占保险金额的15%到20%,到15世纪则降至10%以下。商人弗朗切斯科·达蒂尼的档案中就有一份典型的保险合同。1335-1410年)规定,保险人同意承担“上帝、海洋、战争、火灾、抛弃、被君主、城市或任何其他人扣押、报复、逮捕以及可能发生的任何损失、危险、不幸、障碍或不祥之事的风险,但包装和关税除外”,直至被保险货物安全卸货至目的地。 13 此类合同逐渐标准化——这一标准在被纳入商法( lex mercatoria )后沿用了数个世纪。然而,这些保险人并非专业保险人,而是从事自身贸易的商人。

It is true that insurance companies existed prior to that date. ‘Bottomry’ – the insurance of merchant ships’ ‘bottoms’ (hulls) – was where insurance originated as a branch of commerce. Some say that the first insurance contracts date from early fourteenth-century Italy, when payments for securitas begin to appear in business documents. But the earliest of these arrangements had the character of conditional loans to merchants (as in ancient Babylon), which could be cancelled in case of a mishap, rather than policies in the modern sense;12 in The Merchant of Venice, Antonio’s ‘argosies’ are conspicuously uninsured, leaving him exposed to Shylock’s murderous intent. It was not until the 1350s that true insurance contracts began to appear, with premiums ranging between 15 and 20 per cent of the sum insured, falling below 10 per cent by the fifteenth century. A typical contract in the archives of the merchant Francesco Datini (c. 1335–1410) stipulates that the insurers agree to assume the risks ‘of God, of the sea, of men of war, of fire, of jettison, of detainment by princes, by cities, or by any other person, of reprisals, of arrest, of whatever loss, peril, misfortune, impediment or sinister that might occur, with the exception of packing and customs’ until the insured goods are safely unloaded at their destination.13 Gradually such contracts became standardized – a standard that would endure for centuries after it became incorporated into the lex mercatoria (mercantile law). These insurers were, however, not specialists, but merchants who also engaged in trade on their own account.

从十七世纪末开始,伦敦逐渐形成了一个较为成熟的保险市场。1666年的伦敦大火摧毁了超过13000座房屋,无疑促使人们更加关注保险业的发展。*十四年后,尼古拉斯·巴尔本创立了第一家火灾保险公司。大约在同一时期,一个专门的海上保险市场开始在伦敦塔街(后迁至伦巴底街)爱德华·劳埃德的咖啡馆里逐渐成形。从18世纪30年代到60年代,劳埃德的信息交流活动日趋规范化,最终在1774年,劳埃德协会在皇家交易所成立,最初由79名终身会员组成,每位会员缴纳15英镑的会费。与早期的垄断贸易公司相比,劳埃德协会是一个相对简单的机构,本质上是一个非法人市场参与者协会。承保人的责任(他们会在保险合同上署名,因此也被称为劳合社承保人)是无限的。而当时的财务安排,也就是现在所谓的现收现付制——也就是说,目标是在任何一年收取足够的保费来支付当年的赔款。留出利润空间。有限责任制随着太阳保险公司(Sun Insurance Office,成立于1710年)的成立而进入保险业。太阳保险公司是一家火灾保险专家。十年后(正值南海泡沫时期),皇家交易所保险公司(Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation)和伦敦保险公司(London Assurance Corporation)相继成立,这两家公司专注于人寿保险和海事保险。然而,这三家公司仍然采用现收现付制。伦敦保险公司的数据显示,保费收入通常(但不总是)超过支出,而与法国的战争时期则导致两者出现大幅增长。(这在很大程度上是因为在1793年之前,伦敦的保险公司向法国商人出售保险是很常见的。 14和平时期,这种做法又恢复了,因此在第一次世界大战前夕,德国的大部分商船都由劳合社承保。 15

Beginning in the late seventeenth century, something more like a dedicated insurance market began to form in London. Minds were doubtless focused by the Great Fire of 1666, which destroyed more than 13,000 houses.* Fourteen years later Nicholas Barbon established the first fire insurance company. At around the same time, a specialized marine insurance market began to coalesce in Edward Lloyd’s coffee house in London’s Tower Street (later in Lombard Street). Between the 1730s and the 1760s, the practice of exchanging information at Lloyd’s became more routinized until in 1774 a Society of Lloyd’s was formed at the Royal Exchange, initially bringing together seventy-nine life members, each of whom paid a £15 subscription. Compared with the earlier monopoly trading companies, Lloyd’s was an unsophisticated entity, essentially an unincorporated association of market participants. The liability of the underwriters (who literally wrote their names under insurance contracts, and were hence also known as Lloyd’s Names) was unlimited. And the financial arrangements were what would now be called pay as you go – that is, the aim was to collect sufficient premiums in any given year to cover that year’s payments out and leave a margin of profit. Limited liability came to the insurance business with the founding of the Sun Insurance Office (1710), a fire insurance specialist and, ten years later (at the height of the South Sea Bubble), the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation and the London Assurance Corporation, which focused on life and maritime insurance. However, all three firms still operated on a pay-as-you-go basis. Figures from London Assurance show premium income usually, but not always, exceeding payments out, with periods of war against France causing huge spikes in both. (This was not least because before 1793 it was quite normal for London insurers to sell cover to French merchants.14 In peacetime the practice resumed, so that on the eve of the First World War most of Germany’s merchant marine was insured by Lloyd’s.15)

中世纪时期也存在人寿保险。佛罗伦萨商人贝尔纳多·坎比的账簿中记载了他为教皇(尼古拉五世)、威尼斯总督(弗朗切斯科·福斯卡里)和阿拉贡国王(阿方索五世)投保人寿保险的事迹。然而,这些似乎只不过是赌博,类似于坎比在赛马上下的注。 16事实上,所有这些保险形式——甚至包括最先进的航运保险——都是一种赌博。当时还没有充分的理论基础来评估所承保的风险。随后,大约从1660年开始,在一场令人瞩目的思想创新浪潮中,这一理论基础得以建立。本质上,这其中有六项关键突破:

Life insurance, too, existed in medieval times. The Florentine merchant Bernardo Cambi’s account books contain references to insurance on the life of the pope (Nicholas V), of the doge of Venice (Francesco Foscari) and of the king of Aragon (Alfonso V). It seems, however, that these were little more than wagers, comparable with the bets Cambi made on horse races.16 In truth, all these forms of insurance – including even the most sophisticated shipping insurance – were a form of gambling. There did not yet exist an adequate theoretical basis for evaluating the risks that were being covered. Then, in a remarkable rush of intellectual innovation, beginning in around 1660, that theoretical basis was created. In essence, there were six crucial breakthroughs:

  1. 概率。法国数学家布莱兹·帕斯卡将“对伤害的恐惧不仅应与伤害的严重程度成正比,还应与事件发生的概率成正比”这一洞见归功于波尔皇家修道院的一位僧侣(该洞见发表于《思维艺术》一书中)。帕斯卡和他的朋友皮埃尔·德·费马多年来一直在研究概率问题,但对于保险业的发展而言,这将是一个关键的转折点。

  2. Probability. It was to a monk at Port-Royal that the French mathematician Blaise Pascal attributed the insight (published in the book Ars Cogitandi) that ‘fear of harm ought to be proportional not merely to the gravity of the harm, but also to the probability of the event.’ Pascal and his friend Pierre de Fermat had been toying with problems of probability for many years, but for the evolution of insurance, this was to be a critical point.

  3. 预期寿命。在《思维艺术》( Ars Cogitandi )出版的同一年(1662年),约翰·格朗特发表了《自然与政治观察……基于死亡率统计表》(Natural and Political Observations . . Made upon the Bills of Mortality),试图根据伦敦官方的死亡率统计数据来估算死于特定原因的可能性。然而,格朗特的数据并未包含死亡年龄,这限制了人们能够从中得出的合理推论。他的皇家学会同僚埃德蒙·哈雷利用西里西亚小镇布雷斯劳(今波兰弗罗茨瓦夫)提供给学会的数据,取得了关键性的突破。哈雷的生命表基于1238例出生记录和1174例死亡记录,给出了特定年份不死亡的概率:“20岁的人在一年内不死亡的概率为100比1,而50岁的人在一年内不死亡的概率为38比1……”这将成为精算数学的奠基石之一。17

  4. Life expectancy. In the same year that Ars Cogitandi appeared (1662), John Graunt published his ‘Natural and Political Observations . . . Made upon the Bills of Mortality’, which sought to estimate the likelihood of dying from a particular cause on the basis of official London mortality statistics. However, Graunt’s data did not include ages at death, limiting what could legitimately be inferred from them. It was his fellow member of the Royal Society, Edmund Halley, who made the critical breakthrough using data supplied to the Society from the Silesian town of Breslau (today Wrocław in Poland). Halley’s life table, based on 1,238 recorded births and 1,174 recorded deaths, gives the odds of not dying in a given year: ‘It being 100 to 1 that a Man of 20 dies not in a year, and but 38 to 1 for a Man of 50 . . .’ This was to be one of the founding stones of actuarial mathematics.17

  5. 确定性。雅各布·伯努利于1705年提出,“在相似条件下,未来事件的发生(或不发生)将遵循与过去观察到的相同模式。”他的大数定律指出,例如,根据样本,可以对装满两种球的罐子中的球的总量做出一定程度的推断。这为统计显著性的概念以及在特定置信区间下计算概率奠定了基础(例如,在95%的置信区间下,罐子中30%到40%的球是白色的这一说法意味着,真实比例有95%的概率落在该范围内)。

  6. Certainty. Jacob Bernoulli proposed in 1705 that ‘Under similar conditions, the occurrence (or non-occurrence) of an event in the future will follow the same pattern as was observed in the past.’ His Law of Large Numbers stated that inferences could be drawn with a degree of certainty about, for example, the total contents of a jar filled with two kinds of ball on the basis of a sample. This provides the basis for the concept of statistical significance and modern formulations of probabilities at specified confidence intervals (for example, the statement that between 30 and 40 per cent of the balls in the jar are white, at a confidence interval of 95 per cent, implies that the true proportion lies within that range 95 per cent of the time).

  7. 正态分布。亚伯拉罕·棣莫弗证明,任何重复过程的结果都可以根据其围绕均值或标准差的方差沿曲线分布。棣莫弗在1733年写道:“尽管偶然性会产生不规则性,但在这个过程中,出现规律的概率仍然无限大。”随着时间的推移,这些不规则现象与自然源于原始设计的秩序的再次出现相比,将不成比例。我们在第 3 章中遇到的钟形曲线代表正态分布,其中 68.2% 的结果在均值的一个标准差(正负)范围内。

  8. Normal distribution. It was Abraham de Moivre who showed that outcomes of any kind of iterated process could be distributed along a curve according to their variance around the mean or standard deviation. ‘Tho’ Chance produces Irregularities,’ wrote de Moivre in 1733, ‘still the Odds will be infinitely great, that in process of Time, those Irregularities will bear no proportion to recurrency of that Order which naturally results from Original Design.’ The bell curve that we encountered in Chapter 3 represents the normal distribution, in which 68.2 per cent of outcomes are within one standard deviation (plus or minus) of the mean.

  9. 效用。1738年,瑞士数学家丹尼尔·伯努利提出,“一件物品的价值不应基于其价格,而应基于其带来的效用”,并且“财富的任何小幅增长所带来的效用与先前拥有的商品数量成反比”——换句话说,100 美元对于中等收入者来说比对冲基金经理更有价值。

  10. Utility. In 1738 the Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernoulli proposed that ‘The value of an item must not be based on its price, but rather on the utility that it yields’, and that the ‘utility resulting from any small increase in wealth will be inversely proportionate to the quantity of goods previously possessed’ – in other words $100 is worth more to someone on the median income than to a hedge fund manager.

  11. 推理。托马斯·贝叶斯在其遗作《论概率论中一个问题的解决》(1764年出版)中提出了以下问题:“已知某个未知事件发生和未发生的次数;求该事件在单次试验中发生的概率介于任意两个可命名的概率值之间的概率。”他给出的答案——“任何事件的概率是计算基于该事件发生的期望值时的值与该事件发生时预期结果的概率之比”——预示了现代的表述,即期望效用是事件发生的概率乘以该事件发生时所获得的收益。 18

  12. Inference. In his ‘Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances’ (published posthumously in 1764), Thomas Bayes set himself the following problem: ‘Given the number of times in which an unknown event has happened and failed; Required the chance that the probability of its happening in a single trial lies somewhere between any two degrees of probability that can be named.’ His resolution of the problem – ‘The probability of any event is the ratio between the value at which an expectation depending on the happening of the event ought to be computed, and the chance of the thing expected upon it’s [sic] happening’ – anticipates the modern formulation that expected utility is the probability of an event times the payoff received in case of that event.18

简而言之,现代保险的真正缔造者并非商人,而是数学家。然而,将理论转化为实践的却是神职人员。

In short, it was not merchants but mathematicians who were the true progenitors of modern insurance. Yet it took clergymen to turn theory into practice.


格雷弗里亚斯教堂墓地位于爱丁堡老城中心的小山上,如今最出名的是格雷弗里亚斯·鲍比,一位忠诚的骑士。一只拒绝离开主人坟墓的斯凯梗犬,以及那些在十九世纪初前往此地盗掘尸体供爱丁堡大学医学院解剖的盗墓者——所谓的“复活者”。但格雷弗里亚斯在金融史上的重要性,在于其牧师罗伯特·华莱士及其朋友、托尔布斯牧师亚历山大·韦伯斯特早期的数学工作。他们与爱丁堡大学数学教授科林·麦克劳林共同创建了第一个基于正确精算和金融原则而非商业投机的现代保险基金。

Greyfriars Kirkyard, on the hill that is the heart of Edinburgh’s Old Town, is best known today for Greyfriars Bobby, the loyal Skye terrier who refused to desert his master’s grave, and also for the grave robbers – the so-called ‘Resurrection Men’ – who went there in the early nineteenth century to supply the medical school at Edinburgh University with corpses for dissection. But Greyfriars’s importance in the history of finance lies in the earlier mathematical work of its minister, Robert Wallace, and his friend Alexander Webster, who was minister of Tolbooth. Along with Colin Maclaurin, Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh, it was their achievement to create the first modern insurance fund, based on correct actuarial and financial principles, rather than mercantile gambling.

当时,爱丁堡这座苏格兰首府臭名昭著,被称为“老烟囱”(Auld Reekie)。华莱士和韦伯斯特生活在那里,对人类生存的脆弱有着深刻的体会。他们自己都活到了高龄,分别74岁和75岁。但麦克劳林却在48岁时去世,他在1745年詹姆斯党起义期间为了躲避詹姆斯党人而坠马,冻死在了地上。天主教高地人的入侵只是18世纪中期爱丁堡居民面临的众多危险之一。当时的平均预期寿命不太可能比英格兰高,直到19世纪,英格兰的平均预期寿命也只有37岁。爱丁堡的预期寿命甚至可能和伦敦一样糟糕,18世纪末伦敦的平均预期寿命只有23岁——考虑到苏格兰首府臭名昭著的糟糕卫生状况,或许更糟。 19在华莱士和韦伯斯特看来,有一类人似乎特别容易受到早逝的威胁。根据《安妮法》(1672年),苏格兰教会牧师去世当年,其遗孀和子女只能领取半年的俸禄。此后,他们便陷入贫困。爱丁堡主教于1711年设立了一项补充计划,但仍然沿用传统的现收现付制。华莱士和韦伯斯特深知这远不能令人满意。

Living in Auld Reekie, as the distinctly smelly Scottish capital was then known, Wallace and Webster had a keen sense of the fragility of the human condition. They themselves lived to ripe old ages: 74 and 75 respectively. But Maclaurin died at the age of just 48, having fallen from his horse and suffered exposure while trying to evade the Jacobites during the 1745 rising. Invasions of Papist Highlanders were only one of the hazards inhabitants of Edinburgh faced in the mid-eighteenth century. Average life expectancy at birth is unlikely to have been better than it was in England, where it was just 37 until the 1800s. It may even have been as bad as in London, where it was 23 in the late eighteenth century – perhaps even worse, given the Scottish capital’s notoriously bad hygiene.19 For Wallace and Webster, one group of people seemed especially vulnerable to the consequences of premature death. Under the Law of Ann (1672), the widow and children of a deceased minister of the Church of Scotland received only half a year’s stipend in the year of the minister’s death. After that, they faced penury. A supplementary scheme had been set up by the Bishop of Edinburgh in 1711, but on the traditional pay-as-you-go basis. Wallace and Webster knew this to be unsatisfactory.

保险的精神:亚历山大·韦伯斯特在爱丁堡布道

The spirit of insurance: Alexander Webster preaching in Edinburgh

我们往往认为苏格兰牧师是谨慎节俭的化身,时刻警惕着任何微小的过错都会招致神明的惩罚。但实际上,罗伯特·华莱士不仅是数学天才,还是个嗜酒如命的人,他喜欢和朋友们一起畅饮红酒。兰肯俱乐部(Rankenian Club)的伙伴们,该俱乐部在原兰肯客栈(Ranken's Inn)旧址聚会。*亚历山大·韦伯斯特的绰号是“博纳姆·马格南”(Bonum Magnum),据说“酒精几乎无法影响韦伯斯特博士的理解力或肢体”。然而,在计算预期寿命时,没有人比他更清醒。韦伯斯特和华莱士提出的方案非常巧妙,反映出他们既是18世纪苏格兰启蒙运动的产物,也是此前加尔文主义改革的产物。他们认为,与其仅仅让牧师缴纳年度保费(用于在牧师去世后照顾遗孀和孤儿),不如让保费……这项计划旨在建立一个基金,以便进行盈利性投资。寡妇和孤儿将从投资收益中获得抚恤金,而不仅仅是保费本身。该计划运作的关键在于准确预测未来受益人数以及能够筹集到多少资金来赡养他们。现代精算师至今仍对韦伯斯特和华莱士的计算精度感到惊叹。20华莱士在早期草稿中写道:“丈夫去世后,寡妇应得的份额必须完全依靠经验和精确的计算来确定,但可以先从丈夫生前每年缴纳的保费的三倍开始…… 随后,华莱士转向了他和韦伯斯特从苏格兰各地长老会收集到的证据。似乎“任何时候都有930位牧师在世”:

We tend to think of Scottish clergymen as the epitome of prudence and thrift, weighed down with an anticipation of impending divine retribution for every tiny transgression. In reality, Robert Wallace was a hard drinker as well as a mathematical prodigy, who loved to knock back claret with his bibulous buddies at the Rankenian Club, which met in what used to be Ranken’s Inn.* Alexander Webster’s nickname was Bonum Magnum; it was said to be ‘hardly in the power of liquor to affect Dr Webster’s understanding or his limbs’. Yet no one was more sober when it came to calculations of life expectancy. The plan Webster and Wallace came up with was ingenious, reflecting the fact that they were as much products of Scotland’s eighteenth-century Enlightenment as of the Calvinist Reformation that had preceded it. Rather than merely having ministers pay an annual premium, which could be used to take care of widows and orphans as and when ministers died, they argued that the premiums should be used to create a fund that could then be profitably invested. Widows and orphans would be paid out of the returns on the investment, not just the premiums themselves. All that was required for the scheme to work was an accurate projection of how many beneficiaries there would be in the future, and how much money could be generated to support them. Modern actuaries still marvel at the precision with which Webster and Wallace did their calculations.20 ‘It is experience alone & nice calculation that must determine the proportional sum the widow is to have after the husband’s death,’ wrote Wallace in an early draft, ‘but a beginning may be made by allowing triple the sum the husband payed [sic] in [yearly] during his life . . .’ Wallace then turned to the evidence that he and Webster had been able to gather from presbyteries all over Scotland. It seemed that there tended to be ‘930 ministers in life at all times’:

……20年前一位通灵者发现,每年有27位(930位)牧师去世,其中18位留下遗孀,5位留下没有遗孀的子女,2位留下遗孀的牧师还留下前妻所生的16岁以下的子女;当所有遗孀都去世后,将有3位领取年金的牧师去世或再婚,留下16岁以下的子女。

. . . ’tis found by a Medium of 20 years back, that 27 [of 930] ministers die yearly, 18 of them leave Widows, 5 of them Children without a Widow, 2 of them who leave Widows, leave also Children of a former Marriage, under the Age of 16; and when the whole Number of Widows shall be complete, 3 Annuitants will die, or marry, leaving Children under 16.

华莱士最初估计任何时候在世的寡妇最多有279人;但麦克劳林纠正了这个估计,指出假设寡妇的死亡率恒定是错误的,因为她们的年龄并不相同。为了得出更准确的数字,他参考了哈雷的生命表。 21

Wallace originally estimated the maximum number of widows living at any one time to be 279; but Maclaurin was able to correct this, pointing out that it was wrong to assume a constant mortality rate for the widows, since they would not all be the same age. To arrive at the correct, higher figure, he turned to Halley’s life tables.21

时间将检验他们的计算是否正确。根据最终方案,每位大臣每年需缴纳2英镑12先令6便士至6英镑11先令3便士的保费(共有四个保费等级可供选择)。所得款项将用于建立一个基金,该基金可以进行盈利性投资(最初用于向年轻大臣提供贷款),以产生足够的收入,向新寡妇支付10至25英镑的年金,具体金额取决于……缴纳的保费水平以及基金的管理费用都用于支付这些费用。换句话说,“苏格兰教会牧师遗孀及子女抚恤基金”是第一个按照最大原则运作的保险基金,其资本不断积累,直至利息和缴款足以支付可能产生的最高年金和费用。如果预测有误,基金要么会超出所需金额,要么更糟糕的是,会低于所需金额。在至少五次尝试估算基金增长率后,华莱士和韦伯斯特最终达成一致,预测基金规模将从1748年成立时的18,620英镑增长到1765年的58,348英镑。他们的预测仅相差1英镑。1765年该基金的实际自由资本为58,347英镑。华莱士和韦伯斯特都亲眼见证了他们的计算被证实是正确的。

Time was to be the test of their calculations. According to the final version of the scheme, each minister was to pay an annual premium of between £2 12s 6d and £6 11s 3d (there were four levels of premium to choose from). The proceeds would then be used to create a fund that could be profitably invested (initially in loans to younger ministers) to yield sufficient income to pay annuities to new widows of between £10 and £25, depending on the level of premium paid, and to cover the fund’s management costs. In other words, the ‘Fund for a Provision for the Widows and Children of the Ministers of the Church of Scotland’ was the first insurance fund to operate on the maximum principle, with capital being accumulated until interest and contributions would suffice to pay the maximum amount of annuities and expenses likely to arise. If the projections were wrong, the fund would either overshoot or, more problematically, undershoot the amount required. After at least five attempts to estimate the rate of growth of the fund, Wallace and Webster agreed on figures that projected a rise from £18,620 at the inception in 1748 to £58,348 in 1765. They were out by just one pound. The actual free capital of the fund in 1765 was £58,347. Both Wallace and Webster lived to see their calculations vindicated.

1906年,德国保险专家阿尔弗雷德·马内斯对保险给出了简洁的定义:

In 1906 the German insurance expert Alfred Manes concisely defined insurance as:

一种基于互助原则的经济机构,其设立目的是为了提供资金,而资金的需求源于概率可估算的偶然事件。22

An economic institution resting on the principle of mutuality, established for the purpose of supplying a fund, the need for which arises from a chance occurrence whose probability can be estimated.22

苏格兰大臣遗孀基金(1)的原始计算

Calculations for the original Scottish Ministers’ Widows’ Fund (1)

苏格兰大臣遗孀基金原计算方法(2)

Calculations for the original Scottish Ministers’ Widows’ Fund (2)

苏格兰牧师遗孀基金是首个此类基金,其成立堪称金融史上的里程碑。它不仅为苏格兰牧师树立了典范,也为所有希望避免英年早逝的人们提供了保障。甚至在基金全面运作之前,爱丁堡大学、格拉斯哥大学和圣安德鲁斯大学就已申请加入。在接下来的二十年里,类似的基金如雨后春笋般在整个英语世界涌现,其中包括费城长老会牧师基金(1761年)、英国公平公司(1762年)以及为苏格兰工匠遗孀提供保障的圣玛丽教堂联合法人(1768年)。到1815年,保险的理念已十分普及,甚至连在与拿破仑作战中阵亡的士兵也投保了保险。一名士兵在滑铁卢战役中阵亡的概率约为四分之一。但如果他投保了保险,就能得到些许安慰。他知道,即便在战场上战死,他的妻子和孩子也不会被赶到街头(这赋予了“躲避”一词全新的含义)。到了十九世纪中期,拥有保险就像周日去教堂做礼拜一样,是体面的象征。就连通常不以理财谨慎著称的小说家也能投保。沃尔特·斯科特爵士 23在1826年购买了一份保险,以确保债权人在他去世后仍能收回欠款。*最初旨在帮助数百名牧师遗孀的基金稳步发展,最终成为我们今天所知的苏格兰遗孀保险和养老基金。尽管它现在只是一家普通的金融服务提供商(1999年被劳埃德银行收购),但苏格兰遗孀保险仍然被视为加尔文主义节俭理念的典范,这在很大程度上要归功于金融史上最成功的广告宣传活动之一

The Scottish Ministers’ Widows’ Fund was the first such fund, and its foundation was truly a milestone in financial history. It established a model not just for Scottish clergymen, but for everyone who aspired to provide against premature death. Even before the fund was fully operational, the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews had applied to join. Within the next twenty years similar funds sprang up on the same model all over the English-speaking world, including the Presbyterian Ministers’ Fund of Philadelphia (1761) and the English Equitable Company (1762), as well as the United Incorporations of St Mary’s Chapel (1768), which provided for the widows of Scottish artisans. By 1815 the principle of insurance was so widespread that it was adopted even for those men who lost their lives fighting against Napoleon. A soldier’s odds of being killed at Waterloo were roughly 1 in 4. But if he was insured, he had the consolation of knowing, even as he expired on the field of battle, that his wife and children would not be thrown out onto the streets (giving a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘take cover’). By the middle of the nineteenth century, being insured was as much a badge of respectability as going to Church on a Sunday. Even novelists, not generally renowned for their financial prudence, could join. Sir Walter Scott23 took out a policy in 1826 to reassure his creditors that they would still get their money back in the event of his death.* A fund that had originally been intended to support the widows of a few hundred clergymen grew steadily to become the general insurance and pension fund we know today as Scottish Widows. Although it is now just another financial services provider, having been taken over by Lloyds Bank in 1999, Scottish Widows is still seen as exemplifying the benefits of Calvinist thrift, thanks in no small measure to one of the most successful advertising campaigns in financial history.*


18世纪40年代,没有人预料到,通过不断增加缴纳保费的人数,保险公司及其近亲属组成的养老基金将崛起成为世界上最大的投资者之一。所谓机构投资者,如今主导着全球金融市场。二战后,保险公司获准开始投资股市,它们迅速攫取了英国经济的大量份额,到20世纪50年代中期,它们拥有了英国主要公司约三分之一的股份。24今天仅苏格兰遗孀保险公司一家就管理着超过1000亿英镑的资产。在发达经济体中,保险费占国内生产总值的比例稳步上升,从第一次世界大战前夕的约2%上升到如今的近10%。

What no one anticipated back in the 1740s was that by constantly increasing the number of people paying premiums, insurance companies and their close relatives the pension funds would rise to become some of the biggest investors in the world – the so-called institutional investors who today dominate global financial markets. When, after the Second World War, insurance companies were allowed to start investing in the stock market, they quickly snapped up huge chunks of the British economy, owning around a third of major UK companies by the mid-1950s.24 Today Scottish Widows alone has over £100 billion under management. Insurance premiums have risen steadily as a proportion of gross domestic product in developed economies, from around 2 per cent on the eve of the First World War to just under 10 per cent today.

沃尔特·斯科特爵士的人寿保险单

Sir Walter Scott’s life insurance policy

正如罗伯特·华莱士在250多年前所认识到的那样,规模在保险业至关重要,因为根据平均律,缴费人数越多,预测每年的赔付金额就越容易。虽然无法预先得知任何人的死亡日期,但精算师可以运用华莱士、韦伯斯特和麦克劳林最初应用的原理,以惊人的精确度计算出一大群人的预期寿命。除了投保人的预期寿命之外,保险公司还需要了解其资金的投资收益。他们应该用投保人缴纳的保费购买什么?是像伦敦保险公司首席精算师A.H.贝利等维多利亚时代权威人士推荐的相对安全的债券?还是风险更高但收益可能也更高的股票?换句话说,保险是日常生活风险和不确定性与金融风险和不确定性的交汇点。可以肯定的是,精算科学赋予了保险公司相对于投保人的一种内在优势。在现代概率论出现之前,保险公司是赌徒;如今,它们成了赌场。正如迪基·斯克鲁格斯(Dickie Scruggs)在他声名狼藉之前所言,如今的赔率对投保人/顾客来说极不公平。但正如经济学家肯尼斯·阿罗(Kenneth Arrow)很久以前就指出的那样,我们大多数人宁愿选择一种有100%概率小额损失(我们的年度保费)和小概率大额收益(灾难后的保险赔付)的赌博,也不愿选择一种有100%概率小额收益(无需支付保费)但有不确定概率巨额损失(灾难后无法获得赔付)的赌博。这就是为什么吉他手基思·理查兹(Keith Richards)为他的手指投保,歌手蒂娜·特纳(Tina Turner)为她的双腿投保的原因。只有当保险公司系统性地拒赔那些已经下注的人时,它们长期以来秉持的苏格兰式谨慎声誉才会变成吝啬和缺乏道德底线的恶名。

As Robert Wallace realized more than 250 years ago, size matters in insurance because the more people who pay into a fund the easier it becomes, by the law of averages, to predict what will have to be paid out each year. Although no individual’s date of death can be known in advance, actuaries can calculate the likely life expectancies of a large group of individuals with astonishing precision using the principles first applied by Wallace, Webster and Maclaurin. In addition to how long the policy-holders are likely to live, insurers also need to know what the investment of their funds will bring in. What should they buy with the premiums their policy-holders pay? Relatively safe bonds, as recommended by Victorian authorities such as A. H. Bailey, head actuary of the London Assurance Corporation? Or riskier but probably higher yielding stocks? Insurance, in other words, is where the risks and uncertainties of daily life meet the risks and uncertainties of finance. To be sure, actuarial science gives insurance companies an in-built advantage over policy-holders. Before the dawn of modern probability theory, insurers were the gamblers; now they are the casino. The case can be made, as it was by Dickie Scruggs before his fall from grace, that the odds are now stacked unjustly against the punters/policy-holders. But as the economist Kenneth Arrow long ago pointed out, most of us prefer a gamble that has a 100 per cent chance of a small loss (our annual premium) and a small chance of a large gain (the insurance payout after disaster) to a gamble that has a 100 per cent chance of a small gain (no premiums) but an uncertain chance of a huge loss (no payout after a disaster). That is why the guitarist Keith Richards insured his fingers and the singer Tina Turner her legs. Only if insurance companies systematically fail to pay out to those who have placed their bets will their long-standing reputation for Scottish prudence become a reputation for stinginess and lack of scruple.

然而,这里仍然存在一个谜题。作为现代保险的发源地,英国人至今仍是世界上投保率最高的国家,保费支出超过GDP的12%,比美国人多出约三分之一,几乎是德国人的两倍,这似乎合情合理。 25然而,稍加思考便会引出一个问题:为什么会这样?与美国不同,英国很少遭受极端天气事件的侵袭;在我有生之年,最接近飓风的一次风暴是1987年10月的那场。英国没有哪个城市像旧金山那样位于断层线上。而且,与德国相比,自苏格兰寡妇保险公司成立以来,英国的政治稳定几乎堪称奇迹。那么,英国人为何要购买如此多的保险呢?

Yet there remains a puzzle. It may seem appropriate that, as the inventors of modern insurance, the British remain the world’s most insured people, paying more than 12 per cent of GDP on premiums, roughly a third more than Americans spend on insurance and nearly twice what the Germans spend.25 A moment’s reflection, however, prompts the question, why should that be? Unlike the United States, Britain rarely suffers extreme weather events; the nearest thing to a hurricane in my lifetime was the storm of October 1987. No British city stands on a fault-line, as San Francisco does. And, compared with Germany, Britain’s history since the foundation of Scottish Widows has been one of almost miraculous political stability. Why, then, do the British take out so much insurance?

答案在于另一种防范风险的保障形式——福利国家的兴衰。

The answer lies in the rise and fall of an alternative form of protection against risk: the welfare state.

从战争到福利

From Warfare to Welfare

无论设立多少像苏格兰寡妇基金会这样的私人基金,总会有人无法获得保险保障,他们要么太穷,要么太懒惰,根本没有积蓄以备不时之需。他们的处境极其艰难:要么依赖私人慈善救济,要么忍受济贫院的严苛管理。在伦敦诺森伯兰街的大型马里波恩济贫院,在艰难时期,“穷人,包括跛子、残疾人、老人和盲人”,人数高达1900人。当天气恶劣、工作稀少、食物昂贵时,这些男女“临时工”将不得不忍受如同监狱般的待遇。正如《伦敦新闻画报》在1867年所描述的那样:

No matter how many private funds like Scottish Widows were set up, there were always going to be people beyond the reach of insurance, who were either too poor or too feckless to save for that rainy day. Their lot was a painfully hard one: dependence on private charity or the austere regime of the workhouse. At the large Marylebone Workhouse on London’s Northumberland Street, the ‘poor being lame impotent old and blind’ numbered up to 1,900 in hard times. When the weather was bitter, work scarce and food dear, men and women ‘casuals’ would submit to a prison-like regime. As the Illustrated London News described it in 1867:

他们用大量的冷热水和肥皂洗澡,晚餐吃六盎司面包和一品脱粥;之后,他们的衣服被拿去清洗和熏蒸,换上温暖的羊毛睡衣,然后上床睡觉。诵经员诵读经文,并带领他们祷告;整个过程秩序井然,鸦雀无声。宿舍里整夜有人……床铺由椰棕床垫、绒枕和两块地毯组成。夏季早上六点,冬季早上七点,他们被叫醒并被命令干活。妇女被安排打扫病房或捡拾麻絮;男子被安排砸石头,但任何人在早餐后都不会被耽搁超过四个小时,早餐的种类和份量与晚餐相同。第二天早上,他们的衣服经过消毒和除虫后会归还给他们,那些选择缝补破烂衣物的人会得到针线和布块。如果有人生病,济贫院的医务人员会为他们诊治;如果病得太重无法行走,他们会被送进医务室。

They are washed with plenty of hot and cold water and soap, and receive six ounces of bread and a pint of gruel for supper; after which, their clothes being taken to be cleaned and fumigated, they are furnished with warm woollen night-shirts and sent to bed. Prayers are read by Scripture-readers; strict order and silence are maintained all night in the dormitory . . . The bed consists of a mattress stuffed with coir, a flock pillow, and a pair of rugs. At six o’clock in the morning in summer, and at seven in winter, they are aroused and ordered to work. The women are set to clean the wards, or to pick oakum; the men to break stones, but none are detained longer than four hours after their breakfast which is of the same kind and quantity as their supper. Their clothes, disinfected and freed of vermin, being restored to them in the morning, those who choose to mend their ragged garments are supplied with needles, thread, and patches of cloth for that purpose. If any are ill, the medical officer of the workhouse attends to them; if too ill to travel, they are admitted into the infirmary.

报告作者总结道:“‘业余散客’找不到任何可抱怨的东西……一个由好心人组成的委员会也无能为力了。” 26然而,到了19世纪后期,人们开始逐渐意识到,人生中的失败者应该得到更好的待遇。一种新的风险应对方法的种子开始萌芽——这种方法最终发展成为福利国家。这些国家保险体系旨在通过覆盖所有公民从出生到死亡的整个过程,最大限度地发挥规模经济效益。

The author of the report concluded that ‘the “Amateur Casual” would find nothing to complain of . . . A board of Good Samaritans could do no more.’26 By the later nineteenth century, however, a feeling began to grow that life’s losers deserved better. The seeds began to be planted of a new approach to the problem of risk – one that would ultimately grow into the welfare state. These state systems of insurance were designed to exploit the ultimate economy of scale, by covering literally every citizen from birth to death.

1902年伦敦济贫院的两个场景:从旧麻绳中抽取纤维,以便重新用于造船业。

Two scenes from a London workhouse, 1902: Oakum-picking involved teasing fibres out of old hemp ropes for re-use in ship-building

我们往往认为福利国家是英国的发明,也往往认为它是社会主义或至少是自由主义的发明。事实上,第一个强制性国家医疗保险和养老金制度并非在英国,而是在德国建立的,英国花了二十多年才效仿。福利国家也不是左翼的产物,恰恰相反。正如奥托·冯·俾斯麦在1880年所说,他制定社会保险法的目的是“在广大无产者中培养一种源于享有养老金权利感的保守思想”。在俾斯麦看来,“一个有养老金的人……比一个没有这种保障的人更容易相处。”令他的自由主义反对者感到惊讶的是,俾斯麦公开……他承认这是“国家社会主义思想!全体人民必须承担起帮助无产者的责任。”但他的动机远非利他主义。“无论谁接受这种思想,”他正如有人所观察到的,“他将会掌权。” 27直到1908年,英国才效仿俾斯麦的做法,当时自由党财政大臣大卫·劳合·乔治为70岁以上的老人推出了一项数额适中且需进行收入调查的国家养老金。1911年,《国民健康保险法》紧随其后。尽管劳合·乔治是左翼人士,但他与俾斯麦一样,敏锐地意识到在选举权迅速扩大的体制下,此类措施能够赢得选票。当时,富人的人数远少于穷人。当劳合·乔治提高直接税以支付国家养老金时,他欣然接受了1909年预算案的称号:“人民的预算”。

We tend to think of the welfare state as a British invention. We also tend to think of it as a socialist or at least liberal invention. In fact, the first system of compulsory state health insurance and old age pensions was introduced not in Britain but in Germany, and it was an example the British took more than twenty years to follow. Nor was it a creation of the Left; rather the opposite. The aim of Otto von Bismarck’s social insurance legislation, as he himself put it in 1880, was ‘to engender in the great mass of the unpropertied the conservative state of mind that springs from the feeling of entitlement to a pension.’ In Bismarck’s view, ‘A man who has a pension for his old age is . . . much easier to deal with than a man without that prospect.’ To the surprise of his liberal opponents, Bismarck openly acknowledged that this was ‘a state-socialist idea! The generality must undertake to assist the unpropertied.’ But his motives were far from altruistic. ‘Whoever embraces this idea’, he observed, ‘will come to power.’27 It was not until 1908 that Britain followed the Bismarckian example, when the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George introduced a modest and means-tested state pension for those over 70. A National Health Insurance Act followed in 1911. Though a man of the Left, Lloyd George shared Bismarck’s insight that such measures were vote-winners in a system of rapidly widening electoral franchises. The rich were outnumbered by the poor. When Lloyd George raised direct taxes to pay for the state pension, he relished the label that stuck to his 1909 budget: ‘The People’s Budget.’

然而,如果说福利国家构想源于政治,那么它在战争中走向成熟。第一次世界大战几乎在所有领域都扩大了政府的活动范围。德国潜艇击沉了至少775.9万吨的商船,显然,私人海上保险公司根本无法承保战争风险。事实上,劳合社的标准保单早在1898年就已修改,将“敌对行动或战争行为的后果”(即所谓的fcs条款:“免于被捕获和扣押”)排除在外。但即使是那些已经修改以取消该除外条款的保单,也在战争爆发后被取消。 28国家介入,在美国实际上将商船运输国有化, 29并且(不出所料地)使保险公司能够声称1914年至1918年间船舶遭受的任何损失都是战争造成的。30随着和平的到来,英国政界人士也迅速采取行动,以缓解复员对劳动力市场的影响,于1920年推出了失业保险计划。31这一过程在第二次世界大战期间及战后再次上演。根据经济学家威廉·贝弗里奇主持的跨部门社会保险及相关服务委员会1942年的报告,英国的社会保险制度得到了极大的扩展。该报告建议通过各种国家计划,广泛打击“贫困、疾病、无知、肮脏和懒惰”。1943年3月,丘吉尔在一次广播讲话中总结道:这些措施包括:为所有阶层、所有目的提供从摇篮到坟墓的全国强制性保险;通过政府政策消除失业,这些政策将“对发展施加平衡作用,并可根据情况需要随时启动或停止”;“扩大国有企业和国有企业的范围”;提供更多公共住房;改革公共教育并大幅扩展医疗和福利服务。32

If the welfare state was conceived in politics, however, it grew to maturity in war. The First World War expanded the scope of government activity in nearly every field. With German submarines sending no less than 7,759,000 gross tons of merchant shipping to the bottom of the ocean, there was clearly no way that war risk could be covered by the private marine insurers. The standard Lloyd’s policy had in fact already been modified (in 1898) to exclude ‘the consequences of hostilities or warlike operations’ (the so-called f.c.s. clause: ‘free of capture and seizure’). But even those policies that had been altered to remove that exclusion were cancelled when war broke out.28 The state stepped in, virtually nationalizing merchant shipping in the case of the United States,29 and (predictably) enabling insurance companies to claim that any damage to ships between 1914 and 1918 was a consequence of the war.30 With the coming of peace, politicians in Britain also hastened to cushion the effects of demobilization on the labour market by introducing an Unemployment Insurance Scheme in 1920.31 This process repeated itself during and after the Second World War. The British version of social insurance was radically expanded under the terms of the 1942 Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services, chaired by the economist William Beveridge, which recommended a broad assault on ‘Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness’ through a variety of state schemes. In a March 1943 broadcast, Churchill summarized these as: ‘national compulsory insurance for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave’; the abolition of unemployment by government policies which would ‘exercise a balancing influence upon development which can be turned on or off as circumstances require’; ‘a broadening field for State ownership and enterprise’; more publicly provided housing; reforms to public education and greatly expanded health and welfare services.32

支持国家保险的理由远不止于社会公平。首先,国家保险可以介入私人保险公司不敢涉足的领域。其次,全民甚至强制性的参保制度省去了昂贵的广告和销售活动。第三,正如一位权威人士在20世纪30年代所指出的,“更大的群体应该能为统计经验提供更稳定的平均值”。 33换句话说,国家保险利用了规模经济;那么为什么不尽可能地扩大覆盖范围呢?贝弗里奇报告不仅在英国,而且在全世界都受到了热烈欢迎,这有助于解释为什么福利国家至今仍被认为是“英国制造”。然而,世界上第一个福利超级大国,也是将这一原则推向极致并取得最大成功的国家,并非英国,而是日本。没有什么比日本的经验更能清晰地说明福利国家与战争国家之间的密切联系了。

The arguments for state insurance extended beyond mere social equity. First, state insurance could step in where private insurers feared to tread. Second, universal and sometimes compulsory membership removed the need for expensive advertising and sales campaigns. Third, as one leading authority observed in the 1930s, ‘the larger numbers combined should form more stable averages for the statistical experience’.33 State insurance exploited economies of scale, in other words; so why not make it as comprehensive as possible? The enthusiasm with which the Beveridge Report was greeted not just in Britain but around the world helps explain why the welfare state is still thought of as having ‘Made in Britain’ stamped on it. However, the world’s first welfare superpower, the country that took the principle furthest and with the greatest success, was not Britain but Japan. Nothing illustrates more clearly than the Japanese experience the intimate links between the welfare state and the warfare state.

在圣玛丽勒本济贫院用餐的男人们。上帝的公正和仁慈或许对这些囚犯来说并非显而易见。

Men dining in the St Marylebone workhouse. God’s justice and goodness may not have been immediately obvious to the inmates

二十世纪上半叶,灾难不断袭击日本。1923年9月1日,一场里氏7.9级的大地震袭击了关东地区,横滨和东京两座城市遭受重创。超过12.8万栋房屋完全倒塌,约有相同数量的房屋半倒塌,900栋房屋被海水冲走,近45万栋房屋在地震后几乎立即发生的火灾中被烧毁。 34日本人拥有保险;从1879年到1914年,日本的保险业从无到有发展成为一个充满活力的经济部门,提供海难、死亡、火灾、征兵、交通事故和盗窃等各种保险。超过30家公司销售13种不同的保险产品。例如,在地震发生的那一年,日本公民购买了价值699,634,000日元(3.28亿美元)的保险产品。1923年,日本推出了新的寿险,平均保额为1280日元(约合600美元)。 35但地震造成的总损失高达46亿美元。六年后的大萧条席卷而来,一些农村地区濒临饥荒(当时70%的人口从事农业,其中70%的人平均耕种面积仅为1.5英亩)。 36 1937年,日本发动了一场代价高昂且最终徒劳无功的侵略战争。随后,在1941年12月,日本与世界经济巨头美国开战,最终在广岛和长崎付出了惨痛的代价。除了近300万人在日本注定失败的帝国扩张中丧生外,到1945年底,日本的全部资本似乎已被美国轰炸机摧毁殆尽。根据美国战略轰炸调查,总体而言,超过六十座城市的至少40%的建成区被毁;250万户房屋被毁,导致830万人无家可归。 37几乎唯一幸存下来的城市(尽管也并非完全毫发无损)是京都,这座昔日的皇都至今仍保留着前现代日本的精神风貌,因为它是为数不多仍能看到传统木屋(町屋)的地方之一。只需看一眼这些细长的建筑,看看它们的推拉门、纸屏风、抛光的横梁和草席,就能明白为什么日本的城市如此容易遭受火灾。

Disaster kept striking Japan in the first half of the twentieth century. On 1 September 1923, a huge earthquake (7.9 on the Richter scale) struck the Kantō region, devastating the cities of Yokohama and Tokyo. More than 128,000 houses completely collapsed, around the same number half-collapsed, 900 were swept away by the sea and nearly 450,000 were burnt down in fires that broke out almost immediately after the quake.34 The Japanese were insured; between 1879 and 1914 their insurance industry had grown from nothing into a vibrant sector of the economy, offering cover against loss at sea, death, fire, conscription, transport accident and burglary, to name just some of the thirteen distinct forms of insurance sold by more than thirty companies. In the year of the earthquake, for example, Japanese citizens had purchased ¥699,634,000 ($328 million) worth of new life insurance for 1923, with an average policy amount of ¥1,280 ($600).35 But the total losses caused by the earthquake were in the region of $4.6 billion. Six years later the Great Depression struck, pushing some rural areas to the brink of starvation (at this time 70 per cent of the population was engaged in agriculture, of whom 70 per cent tilled an average of just one and a half acres).36 In 1937 the country embarked on an expensive and ultimately futile war of conquest in China. Then, in December 1941, Japan went to war with the world’s economic colossus, the United States, and eventually paid the ultimate price at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Quite apart from the nearly three million lives lost in Japan’s doomed bid for empire, by the end in 1945 the value of Japan’s entire capital stock seemed to have been reduced to zero by American bombers. In aggregate, according to the US Strategic Bombing Survey, at least 40 per cent of the built-up areas of more than sixty cities had been destroyed; 2.5 million homes had been lost, leaving 8.3 million people homeless.37 Practically the only city to survive intact (though not wholly unscathed) was Kyoto, the former imperial capital – a city which still embodies the ethos of pre-modern Japan, as it is one of the last places where the traditional wooden townhouses known as machiya can still be seen. One look at these long, thin structures, with their sliding doors, paper screens, polished beams and straw mats, makes it clear why Japanese cities were so vulnerable to fire.

在日本,如同在大多数参战国一样,教训显而易见:世界太过危险,私人保险市场根本无法应对。(即使在美国,联邦政府也通过战争损害赔偿公司承担了90%的战争损失风险,该公司是历史上最赚钱的公共部门实体之一,原因显而易见:美国本土并未遭受战争损失。)38即使人们抱有最大的意愿,也不能指望个人为自己投保以应对美国空军造成的损失。几乎所有地方都采取的应对措施是政府接管,实际上是将风险国有化。当日本人着手建立全民福利制度时,1949年,他们的社会保障咨询委员会承认借鉴了英国的经验。在坚信全民福利覆盖的近藤文治看来,是时候让日本人拥有“贝弗里奇式的日本人”(bebariji no nihonhan )了。 39但他们将这一理念推向了比贝弗里奇设想的更远。正如咨询委员会的报告所述,其目标是创造

In Japan, as in most combatant countries, the lesson was clear: the world was just too dangerous a place for private insurance markets to cope with. (Even in the United States, the federal government took over 90 per cent of the risk for war damage through the War Damage Corporation, one of the most profitable public sector entities in history for the obvious reason that no war damage befell the mainland United States.)38 With the best will in the world, individuals could not be expected to insure themselves against the US Air Force. The answer adopted more or less everywhere was for the government to take over, in effect to nationalize risk. When the Japanese set out to devise a system of universal welfare in 1949, their Advisory Council for Social Security acknowledged a debt to the British example. In the eyes of Bunji Kondo, a convinced believer in universal welfare coverage, it was time to have bebariji no nihonhan: Beveridge for the Japanese.39 But they took the idea even further than Beveridge had intended. The aim, as the report of the Advisory Council put it, was to create

一种旨在通过政府支付等方式,为因疾病、伤残、生育、残疾、死亡、年老、失业、多子女家庭及其他导致贫困的原因而需要经济保障的制度……[并且]通过国家援助,保障贫困者享有最低生活水平。40

a system in which measures are taken for economic security for sickness, injury, childbirth, disability, death, old age, unemployment, large families and other causes of impoverishment through . . . payment by governments . . . [and] in which the needy will be guaranteed the minimum standard of living by national assistance.40

从此以后,福利国家将为人们提供保障,抵御现代生活的一切变数。如果他们天生患病,国家会支付医疗费用;如果他们负担不起教育费用,国家会支付;如果他们找不到工作,国家会支付;如果他们病重无法工作,国家会支付;当他们退休时,国家会支付;当他们最终去世时,国家会支付其家属的生活费。这无疑与战后美国占领的目标之一不谋而合:“以福利经济取代封建经济”。 41然而,如果像一些战后评论家那样,认为日本的福利国家是“由外国势力全盘强加的”,那就大错特错了。 42事实上,日本人自己建立了福利国家——而且早在二战结束之前就开始了。真正推动福利国家的并非社会利他主义,而是20世纪中期国家对身强力壮的年轻士兵和工人的贪得无厌。正如美国政治学家哈罗德·D·拉斯韦尔所说,20世纪30年代的日本变成了一个驻军国家。43它也蕴含着建立“战争福利国家”的承诺,以社会保障换取军事牺牲。

From now on, the welfare state would cover people against all the vagaries of modern life. If they were born sick, the state would pay. If they could not afford education, the state would pay. If they could not find work, the state would pay. If they were too ill to work, the state would pay. When they retired, the state would pay. And when they finally died, the state would pay their dependants. This certainly chimed with one of the objectives of the post-war American occupation: ‘To replace a feudal economy by a welfare economy’.41 Yet it would be wrong to assume (as a number of post-war commentators did) that Japan’s welfare state was ‘imposed wholesale by an alien power’.42 In reality, the Japanese set up their own welfare state – and they began to do so long before the end of the Second World War. It was the mid-twentieth-century state’s insatiable appetite for able-bodied young soldiers and workers, not social altruism, that was the real driver. As the American political scientist Harold D. Lasswell put it, Japan in the 1930s became a garrison state.43 But it was one which carried within it the promise of a ‘warfare-welfare state’, offered social security in return for military sacrifice.

日本此前已经有一些基本的社会保险制度。20世纪30年代:工厂事故保险和健康保险(1927年为工厂工人引入)。但这仅覆盖了不到五分之二的产业工人。44值得注意的是,日本帝国政府于1937年7月9日批准了厚生省(Kōseishō)的计划,而此时距离对华战争爆发仅两个月。 45其第一步是引入新的全民健康保险制度,以补充现有的产业工人保险计划。从1938年底到1944年底,该计划的覆盖人数增长了近百倍,从略高于50万人增加到超过4000万人。其目标很明确:更健康的民众将确保天皇军队拥有更健康的兵源。战时的口号“全民皆兵”(kokumin kai hei)被改为“全民皆应享有保险”(kokumin kai hoken)。为了确保全民覆盖,医疗行业和制药业基本上都隶属于国家。46战争年代还推行了海员和工人的强制性养老金制度,国家承担10%的费用,雇主和雇员各缴纳后者工资的5.5%。大规模公共住房建设也开始实施。因此,战后日本的变革在很大程度上是战时福利国家的延伸。如今,“人人都有养老金”(kokumin kai nenkin)。如今应该有失业保险,而不是像以前那样,即使在经济不景气时期也让工人继续领取工资。难怪一些日本人倾向于从民族主义的角度看待福利,将其视为一种和平的民族扩张方式。1950年的报告及其英式建议实际上被政府拒绝了。直到1961年,在美国控制结束很久之后,其中的大部分建议才被采纳。到了20世纪70年代末,日本政治家中川八弘可以自豪地宣称,日本已经成为“福利超级大国”(福祉超级大国),正是因为其福利制度不同于(并且优于)西方模式。 47

There had been some basic social insurance in Japan before the 1930s: factory accident insurance and health insurance (introduced for factory workers in 1927). But this covered less than two fifths of the industrial workforce.44 Significantly, the plan for a Japanese Welfare Ministry (Kōseishō) was approved by Japan’s imperial government on 9 July 1937, just two months after the outbreak of war with China.45 Its first step was to introduce a new system of universal health insurance to supplement the existing programme for industrial employees. Between the end of 1938 and the end of 1944, the number of citizens covered by the scheme increased nearly a hundred-fold, from just over 500,000 to over 40 million. The aim was explicit: a healthier populace would ensure healthier recruits to the Emperor’s armed forces. The wartime slogan of ‘all people are soldiers’ (kokumin kai hei) was adapted to become ‘all people should have insurance’ (kokumin kai hoken). And to ensure universal coverage, the medical profession and pharmaceutical industry were essentially subordinated to the state.46 The war years also saw the introduction of compulsory pension schemes for seamen and workers, with the state covering 10 per cent of the costs, while employers and employees each contributed 5.5 per cent of the latter’s wages. The first steps towards the large-scale provision of public housing were also taken. So what happened after the war in Japan was in large measure the extension of the warfare-welfare state. Now ‘all people should have pensions’, kokumin kai nenkin. Now there should be unemployment insurance, rather than the earlier paternalistic practice of keeping workers on payrolls even in lean times. Small wonder some Japanese tended to think of welfare in nationalistic terms, a kind of peaceful mode of national aggrandisement. The 1950 report, with its British-style recommendations, was in fact rejected by the government. Only in 1961, long after the end of American control, were most of its recommendations adopted. By the late 1970s a Japanese politician, Nakagawa Yatsuhiro, could boast that Japan had become ‘The Welfare Super-Power’ (fukushi chōdaikoku), precisely because its system was different from (and superior to) Western models.47

事实上,日本的福利制度本身并没有什么独特之处。大多数福利国家的目标都是实现全民覆盖,从摇篮到坟墓。然而,日本的福利制度似乎高效得令人惊叹。就预期寿命而言,日本领先世界。在教育方面,日本也遥遥领先。20世纪70年代中期,日本约有90%的人口高中毕业,而英国的这一比例仅为32%。 48除了瑞典之外,日本的社会平等程度也远高于其他西方国家。日本拥有世界上最大的国家养老基金,因此,每一位退休的日本人都能获得丰厚的退休金,并在其(通常相当长的)安享晚年期间获得稳定的收入。这个福利超级大国在节约方面也堪称奇迹。1975年,日本国民收入中只有9%用于社会保障,而瑞典的这一比例为31%。 49日本的税收和社会福利负担大约只有英国的一半。在此基础上,福利国家的运作似乎完全合情合理。日本实现了全民安全——消除了风险——与此同时,其经济增长迅猛,到1968年已成为世界第二大经济体。一年前,赫尔曼·卡恩曾预测,到2000年,日本的人均收入将超过美国。事实上,中川八弘指出,如果将福利考虑在内,“日本工人的实际收入至少是美国工人的三倍”。战争未能使日本成为世界第一强国,但福利制度却取得了成功。关键不在于对外扩张,而在于国内的社会保障体系

There was in fact nothing institutionally unique about Japan’s system, of course. Most welfare states aimed at universal, cradle-to-grave coverage. Yet the Japanese welfare state seemed to be a miracle of effectiveness. In terms of life expectancy, the country led the world. In education, too, it was ahead of the field. Around 90 per cent of the population had graduated from high school in the mid-seventies, compared with just 32 per cent in England.48 Japan was also a much more equal society than any in the West, with the sole exception of Sweden. And Japan had the largest state pension fund in the world, so that every Japanese who retired could count on a generous bonus as well as a regular income throughout his (generally rather numerous) years of well-earned rest. The welfare superpower was also a miracle of parsimony. In 1975 just 9 per cent of national income went on social security, compared with 31 per cent in Sweden.49 The burden of tax and social welfare was roughly half that in England. Run on this basis, the welfare state seemed to make perfect sense. Japan had achieved security for all – the elimination of risk – while at the same time its economy grew so rapidly that by 1968 it was the second largest in the world. A year before, Herman Kahn had predicted that Japan’s per capita income would overtake America’s by 2000. Indeed, Nakagawa Yatsuhiro argued that, when fringe benefits were taken into account, ‘the actual income of the Japanese worker [was already] at least three times more than that of the American’.50 Warfare had failed to make Japan Top Nation, but welfare was succeeding. The key turned out to be not a foreign empire, but a domestic safety net.51

然而,战后福利国家的设计却存在一个致命缺陷。福利国家在20世纪70年代的日本或许运转良好,但在西方世界却并非如此。尽管日本和英国在地理和历史上有着表面上的相似之处(欧亚大陆沿岸的群岛、帝国历史、清醒时拘谨的举止),但它们的文化却截然不同。表面上看,它们的福利制度可能很相似:都采用传统的现收现付模式,依靠税收来支付国家养老金;都采用标准化的福利制度。退休年龄;全民医疗保险;失业救济金;农民补贴;以及相当严格的劳动力市场限制。但这些制度在两国运作方式截然不同。在日本,平等主义是备受推崇的政策目标,而社会顺从文化则鼓励人们遵守规则。相比之下,英国的个人主义倾向使人们倾向于玩弄制度的漏洞。在日本,企业和家庭在福利体系中继续扮演着重要的支持角色。雇主提供补充福利,并且不愿解雇员工。直到20世纪90年代,仍有三分之二的64岁以上日本人与子女同住。 52相比之下,在英国,雇主在经济困难时期毫不犹豫地削减工资,而人们则更倾向于将年迈的父母托付给国民医疗服务体系(NHS)。福利国家或许使日本成为经济超级大国,但在20世纪70年代,它在英国似乎产生了截然相反的效果。

Yet there was a catch, a fatal flaw in the design of the post-warfare welfare state. The welfare state might have worked smoothly enough in 1970s Japan. But the same could not be said of its counterparts in the Western world. Despite their superficial topographical and historical resemblances (archipelagos off Eurasia, imperial pasts, buttoned-up behaviour when sober) the Japanese and the British had quite different cultures. Outwardly, their welfare systems might seem similar: state pensions financed out of taxation on the old pay-as-you-go model; standardized retirement ages; universal health insurance; unemployment benefits; subsidies to farmers; quite heavily restricted labour markets. But these institutions worked in quite different ways in the two countries. In Japan egalitarianism was a prized goal of policy, while a culture of social conformism encouraged compliance with the rules. English individualism, by contrast, inclined people cynically to game the system. In Japan, firms and families continued to play substantial supporting roles in the welfare system. Employers offered supplementary benefits and were reluctant to fire workers. As recently as the 1990s, two thirds of Japanese older than 64 lived with their children.52 In Britain, by contrast, employers did not hesitate to slash payrolls in hard times, while people were much more likely to leave elderly parents to the tender mercies of the National Health Service. The welfare state might have made Japan an economic superpower, but in the 1970s it appeared to be having the opposite effect in Britain.

英国保守派人士认为,英国的社会保障体系最初是国民保险制度,但后来却演变成国家救济和高额税收的体系,严重扭曲了经济激励机制。1930年至1980年间,英国的社会转移支付占国内生产总值的比例从2.2%上升到1960年的10%,1970年的13%,以及1980年的近17%,比日本高出6%以上。 53医疗保健、社会服务和社会保障支出占政府总支出的比例是国防支出的三倍。然而,结果却令人失望。英国福利支出的增加伴随着低增长和远高于发达国家平均水平的通货膨胀。一个特别严重的问题是生产率增长长期缓慢(1960年至1979年间,英国人均实际GDP仅增长了2.8%,而日本同期为8.1%),54这似乎与英国工会强硬的谈判策略密切相关(“怠工”是他们常用的替代“罢工”的手段)。与此同时,高收入人群的边际税率超过100%。资本利得抑制了传统的储蓄和投资方式。英国的福利制度似乎消除了资本主义经济赖以运转的激励机制:对努力奋斗者给予丰厚的收入作为诱饵,对懈怠者施以艰辛的惩罚。其结果是“滞胀”:经济增长停滞加上高通胀。美国经济也面临着类似的问题,医疗、医疗保险、收入保障和社会保障支出占GDP的比重从1959年的4%上升到1975年的9%,首次超过了国防开支。在美国,生产力增长乏力,滞胀肆虐。该怎么办呢?

According to British conservatives, what had started out as a system of national insurance had degenerated into a system of state handouts and confiscatory taxation which disastrously skewed economic incentives. Between 1930 and 1980, social transfers in Britain had risen from just 2.2 per cent of gross domestic product to 10 per cent in 1960, 13 per cent in 1970 and nearly 17 per cent in 1980, more than 6 per cent higher than in Japan.53 Health care, social services and social security were consuming three times more than defence as a share of total managed government expenditure. Yet the results were dismal. Increased expenditure on UK welfare had been accompanied by low growth and inflation significantly above the developed world average. A particular problem was chronically slow productivity growth (real GDP per person employed grew by just 2.8 per cent between 1960 and 1979, compared with 8.1 per cent in Japan),54 which in turn seemed closely related to the bloody-minded bargaining techniques of British trade unions (‘go slows’ being a favourite alternative to outright ‘downing tools’). Meanwhile, marginal tax rates in excess of 100 per cent on higher incomes and capital gains discouraged traditional forms of saving and investment. The British welfare state, it seemed, had removed the incentives without which a capitalist economy simply could not function: the carrot of serious money for those who strove, the stick of hardship for those who slacked. The result was ‘stagflation’: stagnant growth plus high inflation. Similar problems were afflicting the US economy, where expenditure on health, Medicare, income security and social security had risen from 4 per cent of GDP in 1959 to 9 per cent in 1975, outstripping defence spending for the first time. In America, too, productivity was scarcely growing and stagflation was rampant. What was to be done?

一个人和他的学生们认为他们找到了答案。很大程度上由于他们的影响,过去二十五年中最显著的经济趋势之一就是西方福利国家的瓦解,这让人们猛然意识到,他们原本以为已经摆脱了那个难以预测的怪兽:风险。

One man, and his pupils, thought they knew the answer. Thanks in large measure to their influence, one of the most pronounced economic trends of the past twenty-five years has been for the Western welfare state to be dismantled, reintroducing people with a sharp shock to the unpredictable monster they thought they had escaped from: risk.

大寒

The Big Chill

1976年,一位在芝加哥大学任教的身材矮小的教授荣获诺贝尔经济学奖。米尔顿·弗里德曼作为经济学家的声誉很大程度上建立在他重申通货膨胀是由货币供应量过度增加造成的这一观点之上。正如我们所见,他与人合著了或许是美国货币政策史上最重要的著作,书中明确指出,大萧条的罪魁祸首是美联储的失误。 55但到了七十年代中期,他开始关注的问题是:福利国家究竟出了什么问题?1975年3月,弗里德曼从芝加哥飞往智利,试图解答这个问题。

In 1976 a diminutive professor working at the University of Chicago won the Nobel Prize in economics. Milton Friedman’s reputation as an economist rested in large measure on his reinstatement of the idea that inflation was due to an excessive increase in the supply of money. As we have seen, he co-wrote perhaps the single most important book on US monetary policy of all time, firmly laying the blame for the Great Depression on mistakes by the Federal Reserve.55 But the question that had come to preoccupy him by the mid-seventies was: what had gone wrong with the welfare state? In March 1975, Friedman flew from Chicago to Chile to answer that question.

米尔顿·弗里德曼

Milton Friedman

仅仅18个月前,也就是1973年9月,坦克开进首都圣地亚哥,推翻了马克思主义总统萨尔瓦多·阿连德的政府,阿连德试图……将智利变成共产主义国家的努力最终导致经济彻底崩溃,议会呼吁军事政变。空军战机轰炸了总统府莫内达宫,阿连德的反对者们在附近的卡雷拉酒店的阳台上目睹了这一切,并举杯香槟庆祝。在总统府内,总统本人手持一支AK47步枪——这是他一直试图效仿的菲德尔·卡斯特罗赠送的——进行着一场毫无希望的抵抗。当坦克隆隆驶来时,阿连德意识到一切都结束了,被困在残破的住所中,他饮弹自尽。

Only eighteen months earlier, in September 1973, tanks had rolled through the capital Santiago to overthrow the government of the Marxist President Salvador Allende, whose attempt to turn Chile into a Communist state had ended in total economic chaos and a call by the parliament for a military takeover. Air force jets bombed the presidential Moneda Palace, watched from the balcony of the nearby Carrera Hotel by opponents of Allende who celebrated with champagne. Inside the palace, the president himself fought a hopeless rearguard action armed with an AK47 – a gift from Fidel Castro, the man he had sought to emulate. As the tanks rumbled towards him, Allende realized it was all over and, cornered in what was left of his quarters, shot himself.

这场政变凸显了战后福利国家在全球范围内的危机,并提出了两种截然不同的经济体系之间的鲜明选择。随着产出崩溃和通货膨胀猖獗,智利的全民福利和国家养老金体系实际上已经破产。对阿连德而言,解决之道在于全面推行马克思主义,即对经济生活的方方面面进行苏联式的彻底接管。将军们及其支持者深知,他们反对的是……确实如此。但既然现状显然难以为继,这些措施究竟有何意义?米尔顿·弗里德曼出现了。在讲学和研讨会之余,他与新任总统皮诺切特将军会面了四十五分钟,之后又给他写了一份关于智利经济形势的评估报告,敦促他削减政府赤字。弗里德曼指出,政府赤字是导致智利通货膨胀率居高不下的主要原因,当时的年通货膨胀率高达900%。56弗里德曼访问一个月后,智利军政府宣布将“不惜一切代价”遏制通货膨胀。该政权削减了27%的政府开支,并焚烧了大量纸币。但弗里德曼提供的远不止他惯用的货币主义休克疗法。在返回芝加哥后写给皮诺切特的一封信中,他指出,通货膨胀的“问题”源于“四十年前开始的社会主义趋势,并在阿连德政权时期达到了其合乎逻辑的——也是可怕的——顶峰”。他后来回忆说:“我当时的总体思路是……他们目前的困境几乎完全是由于过去四十年来走向集体主义、社会主义和福利国家的趋势造成的……” 57他还向皮诺切特保证:“通货膨胀的结束将导致资本市场的迅速扩张,这将极大地促进目前仍由政府掌控的企业和活动向私营部门的转移。” 58

The coup epitomized a world-wide crisis of the post-war welfare state and posed a stark choice between rival economic systems. With output collapsing and inflation rampant, Chile’s system of universal benefits and state pensions was essentially bankrupt. For Allende, the answer had been full-blown Marxism, a complete Soviet-style takeover of every aspect of economic life. The generals and their supporters knew they were against that. But what were they actually for, since the status quo was clearly unsustainable? Enter Milton Friedman. Amid his lectures and seminars, he spent three quarters of an hour with the new president General Pinochet and later wrote him an assessment of the Chilean economic situation, urging him to reduce the government deficit that he had identified as the main cause of the country’s sky-high inflation, then running at an annual rate of 900 per cent.56 A month after Friedman’s visit, the Chilean junta announced that inflation would be stopped ‘at any cost’. The regime cut government spending by 27 per cent and set fire to bundles of banknotes. But Friedman was offering more than his patent monetarist shock therapy. In a letter to Pinochet written after his return to Chicago, he argued that ‘this problem’ of inflation arose ‘from trends toward socialism that started forty years ago, and reached their logical – and terrible – climax in the Allende regime’. As he later recalled, ‘The general line I was taking . . . was that their present difficulties were due almost entirely to the forty-year trend toward collectivism, socialism, and the welfare state . . .’57 And he assured Pinochet: ‘The end of inflation will lead to a rapid expansion of the capital market, which will greatly facilitate the transfer of enterprises and activities still in the hands of the government to the private sector.’58

弗里德曼因提出这一建议而遭到美国媒体的谴责。毕竟,他当时是为一位军事独裁者担任顾问,而这位独裁者应对两千多名真正的或被怀疑的共产党员的处决以及近三万人的酷刑折磨负责。《纽约时报》质问道:“……如果纯粹的芝加哥经济理论在智利只能以镇压为代价才能实施,那么它的制定者是否应该承担一些责任?” *

For tendering this advice Friedman found himself denounced by the American press. After all, he was acting as a consultant to a military dictator responsible for the executions of more than two thousand real and suspected Communists and the torture of nearly 30,000 more. As the New York Times asked: ‘. . . if the pure Chicago economic theory can be carried out in Chile only at the price of repression, should its authors feel some responsibility?’*

芝加哥在新体制中的作用远不止米尔顿·弗里德曼的一次访问。自20世纪50年代以来,一直存在着……一批批才华横溢的智利年轻经济学家通过与圣地亚哥天主教大学的交换项目前往芝加哥大学深造,他们回国后深信必须平衡预算、收紧货币供应并开放贸易。 59这些人被称为“芝加哥男孩”,是弗里德曼的得力助手:豪尔赫·考亚斯,皮诺切特的财政部长,后来的经济“超级部长”;塞尔吉奥·德·卡斯特罗,他的继任者,财政部长;米格尔·卡斯特,劳工部长,后来的中央银行行长;以及至少其他八位在芝加哥大学学习后进入政府任职的人士。甚至在阿连德政权垮台之前,他们就已经制定了一份详细的改革方案,由于手稿很厚,被称为“ El Ladrillo”(砖头)。然而,最激进的措施却出自一位选择在哈佛大学而非芝加哥大学学习的天主教大学学生之手。他所设想的,是对福利国家一代人以来最深刻的挑战。撒切尔和里根是后来者。对福利制度的反弹始于智利。

Chicago’s role in the new regime consisted of more than just one visit by Milton Friedman. Since the 1950s, there had been a regular stream of bright young Chilean economists studying at Chicago on an exchange programme with the Universidad Católica in Santiago, and they went back convinced of the need to balance the budget, tighten the money supply and liberalize trade.59 These were the so-called Chicago Boys, Friedman’s foot soldiers: Jorge Cauas, Pinochet’s finance minister and later economics ‘superminister’, Sergio de Castro, his successor as finance minister, Miguel Kast, labour minister and later central bank chief, and at least eight others who studied in Chicago and went on to serve in government. Even before the fall of Allende, they had devised a detailed programme of reforms known as El Ladrillo (The Brick) because of the thickness of the manuscript. The most radical measures, however, would come from a Catholic University student who had opted to study at Harvard, not Chicago. What he had in mind was the most profound challenge to the welfare state in a generation. Thatcher and Reagan came later. The backlash against welfare started in Chile.

对于当时年仅24岁、皮诺切特夺取政权的何塞·皮涅拉来说,哈佛大学的邀请他返回智利是一个痛苦的抉择。他对皮诺切特政权的本质毫不怀疑。然而,他也相信这是一个将自他抵达新英格兰以来就一直在脑海中酝酿的想法付诸实践的机会。在他看来,关键不仅仅在于降低通货膨胀。更重要的是要加强财产权与政治权利之间的联系,而这正是北美资本主义民主实验成功的核心所在。皮涅拉认为,实现这一目标最可靠的方法莫过于彻底改革福利国家,首先要改革现收现付制的养老金和其他福利制度。在他看来:

For José Piñera, just 24 when Pinochet seized power, the invitation to return to Chile from Harvard posed an agonizing dilemma. He had no illusions about the nature of Pinochet’s regime. Yet he also believed there was an opportunity to put into practice ideas that had been taking shape in his mind ever since his arrival in New England. The key, as he saw it, was not just to reduce inflation. It was also essential to foster that link between property rights and political rights which had been at the heart of the successful North American experiment with capitalist democracy. There was no surer way to do this, Piñera believed, than radically to overhaul the welfare state, beginning with the pay-as-you-go system of funding state pensions and other benefits. As he saw it:

原本的大规模保险体系,最终却沦为税收体系,今天的缴款用于支付今天的福利,而不是积累资金以备将来之用。这种“现收现付”的方式取代了……的原则。节俭与权利意识并存……[但这种做法]根植于对人类行为方式的错误认知。它在个人层面上破坏了贡献与收益之间的联系,换句话说,破坏了努力与回报之间的联系。无论这种情况在何处大规模、长期存在,最终结果都是灾难性的。60

What had begun as a system of large-scale insurance had simply become a system of taxation, with today’s contributions being used to pay today’s benefits, rather than to accumulate a fund for future use. This ‘pay-as-you-go’ approach had replaced the principle of thrift with the practice of entitlement . . . [But this approach] is rooted in a false conception of how human beings behave. It destroys, at the individual level, the link between contributions and benefits. In other words, between effort and reward. Wherever that happens on a massive scale and for a long period of time, the final result is disaster.60

1979年至1981年间,皮涅拉担任劳工部长(后任矿业部长)期间,为智利创建了一套全新的养老金制度,让每位劳动者都有机会退出国家养老金体系。他们无需缴纳工资税,而是将等额资金(相当于工资的10%)存入个人退休账户,该账户由名为“养老金基金管理公司”(Administradora de Fondos de Pensiones ,简称AFPs)的私营公司管理,这些公司之间相互竞争。61达到退休年龄后,参与者可以提取资金购买年金;或者,如果他们愿意,也可以继续工作并继续缴款。除了养老金外,该计划还包括残疾保险和人寿保险。其理念是让智利劳动者感受到,他们存下的钱确实是他们自己的资本。正如埃尔南·布奇(他曾协助皮涅拉起草社会保障法,并随后实施了医疗改革)所言:“社会福利项目必须包含一些激励个人努力的措施,并让人们逐步对自己的命运负责。没有什么比鼓励社会寄生的社会福利项目更可悲的了。” 62

Between 1979 and 1981, as minister of labour (and later minister of mining), Piñera created a radically new pension system for Chile, offering every worker the chance to opt out of the state pension system. Instead of paying a payroll tax, they would put an equivalent amount (10 per cent of their wages) into an individual Personal Retirement Account, to be managed by private and competing companies known as Administradora de Fondos de Pensiones (AFPs).61 On reaching retirement age, a participant would withdraw his money and use it to buy an annuity; or, if he preferred, he could keep working and contributing. In addition to a pension, the scheme also included a disability and life insurance premium. The idea was to give the Chilean worker a sense that the money being set aside was really his own capital. In the words of Hernán Büchi (who helped Piñera draft the social security legislation and went on to implement the reform of health care), ‘Social programmes have to include some incentive for individual effort and for persons gradually to be responsible for their own destiny. There is nothing more pathetic than social programmes that encourage social parasitism.’62

皮涅拉孤注一掷。他让工人们做出选择:要么继续沿用旧的现收现付制,要么选择新的个人退休账户。他软磨硬泡,频繁出现在电视上,向工人们保证“没人会拿走你奶奶的支票”(指旧的国家养老金)。他立场坚定,讽刺地驳斥了一项提议,即由全国工会而非工人个人来决定其成员的个人退休账户。最终,在1980年11月4日,这项改革获得批准,并在皮涅拉的“别有用心”的建议下生效。次年5月1日,国际劳动节,这项改革正式实施。 63公众反响热烈。到1990年,超过70%的工人已转入私人医疗保险体系。 64每位工人都收到了一本崭新的账簿,上面记录着他们的缴款和投资收益。到2006年底,约有770万智利人拥有个人退休账户;另有270万人参加了所谓的ISAPRE体系下的私人医疗保险计划,该体系允许工人选择退出国家医疗保险体系,转而选择私人医疗机构。这听起来或许并不起眼,但与皮诺切特时期实施的其他受芝加哥改革启发的改革一样,这项改革的规模堪比马克思主义者阿连德在1973年计划的任何改革。此外,这项改革必须在经济极度不稳定的时期推行,这是1979年将智利货币与美元挂钩这一不明智的决定造成的后果,当时通货膨胀的巨龙似乎已被消灭。美国利率随后上升,通缩压力使智利陷入衰退,险些使芝加哥-哈佛的交流计划彻底搁浅。1982年,智利经济萎缩了13%,似乎印证了左翼批评者对弗里德曼“休克疗法”的质疑。直到1985年底,这场危机才真正结束。到1990年,改革的成功已显而易见:福利改革使政府总支出占GDP的比重从34%降至22%,降幅达一半。

Piñera gambled. He gave workers a choice: stick with the old system of pay-as-you-go, or opt for the new Personal Retirement Accounts. He cajoled, making regular television appearances to reassure workers that ‘Nobody will take away your grandmother’s cheque’ (from the old state system). He held firm, sarcastically dismissing a proposal that the country’s trade unions, rather than individual workers, should be responsible for choosing their members’ AFPs. Finally, on 4 November 1980, the reform was approved, coming into effect at Piñera’s mischievous suggestion on 1 May, international Labour Day, the following year.63 The public response was enthusiastic. By 1990 more than 70 per cent of workers had made the switch to the private system.64 Each one received a shiny new book in which the contributions and investment returns were recorded. By the end of 2006, around 7.7 million Chileans had a Personal Retirement Account; 2.7 million were also covered by private health schemes, under the so-called ISAPRE system, which allowed workers to opt out of the state health insurance system in favour of a private provider. It may not sound like it, but – along with the other Chicago-inspired reforms implemented under Pinochet – this represented as big a revolution as anything the Marxist Allende had planned back in 1973. Moreover, the reform had to be introduced at a time of extreme economic instability, a consequence of the ill-judged decision to peg the Chilean currency to the dollar in 1979, when the inflation dragon appeared to have been slain. When US interest rates rose shortly afterwards, the deflationary pressure plunged Chile into a recession that threatened to derail the Chicago-Harvard express altogether. The economy contracted 13 per cent in 1982, seemingly vindicating the left-wing critics of Friedman’s ‘shock treatment’. Only towards the end of 1985 could the crisis really be regarded as over. By 1990 it was clear that the reform had been a success: welfare reforms were responsible for fully half the decline of total government expenditure from 34 per cent of GDP to 22 per cent.

这一切值得吗?芝加哥和哈佛的那些学子们冒着巨大的道德风险,与一位残暴的军事独裁者沆瀣一气,这一切值得吗?答案取决于你是否认为这些经济改革为智利重返可持续民主铺平了道路。1980年,政变仅仅七年后,皮诺切特就签署了一部新宪法,规定了十年过渡期,逐步恢复民主。1990年,在全民公投中败北后,他辞去了总统职务(尽管他继续掌管军队长达八年)。民主得以恢复,而此时,经济奇迹也已拉开帷幕。这有助于确保其生存。养老金改革不仅创造了一个新的财产所有者阶层,每个人都拥有自己的退休储蓄,而且还极大地提振了智利经济,因为其显著提高了储蓄率(到1989年达到GDP的30%,为拉丁美洲最高)。最初,规定了上限,限制个人退休账户(AFP)将超过6%(后来提高到12%)的新养老基金投资于智利境外。65此举旨在确保智利新的储蓄来源用于本国经济发展。2008年1月,我访问了圣地亚哥,亲眼目睹智利银行的经纪人忙于将智利工人的养老金投资于本国股市。结果令人瞩目。个人退休账户的年回报率超过10%,反映了智利股市的飙升表现,自1987年以来,智利股市已上涨了18倍。

Was it worth it? Was it worth the huge moral gamble that the Chicago and Harvard boys made, of getting into bed with a murderous, torturing military dictator? The answer depends on whether or not you think these economic reforms helped pave the way back to a sustainable democracy in Chile. In 1980, just seven years after the coup, Pinochet conceded a new constitution that prescribed a ten-year transition back to democracy. In 1990, having lost a referendum on his leadership, he stepped down as president (though he remained in charge of the army for a further eight years). Democracy was restored, and by that time the economic miracle was under way that helped to ensure its survival. For the pension reform not only created a new class of property owners, each with his own retirement nest egg. It also gave the Chilean economy a massive shot in the arm, since the effect was significantly to increase the savings rate (to 30 per cent of GDP by 1989, the highest in Latin America). Initially, a cap was imposed that prevented the AFPs from investing more than 6 per cent (later 12 per cent) of the new pension funds outside Chile.65 The effect of this was to ensure that Chile’s new source of savings was channelled into the country’s own economic development. In January 2008 I visited Santiago and watched brokers at the Banco de Chile busily investing the pension contributions of Chilean workers in their own stock market. The results have been impressive. The annual rate of return on the Personal Retirement Accounts has been over 10 per cent, reflecting the soaring performance of the Chilean stock market, which has risen by a factor of 18 since 1987.

当然,这套体系也有其阴暗面。有人认为,该体系的行政和财政成本过高。 66由于并非所有人都有稳定的全职工作,因此并非所有人都能参与到这套体系中来。自雇人士无需缴纳个人退休账户,临时工也无需缴纳。这导致相当一部分人口完全没有养老金保障,其中包括许多居住在拉维多利亚的居民。拉维多利亚曾是民众反抗皮诺切特政权的温床,如今依然是切·格瓦拉头像被喷涂在墙上的地方。另一方面,政府愿意为那些储蓄不足以支付最低养老金的人提供补贴,前提是他们至少工作了二十年。此外,还有一种基本团结养老金,供那些不符合领取最低养老金条件的人领取。 67最重要的是,自“芝加哥男孩”改革以来,智利经济表现的改善是毋庸置疑的。在弗里德曼访问前的十五年里,经济增长率为0.17%。在随后的十五年里,增长率为3.28%,几乎是其他地区的二十倍。贫困率已大幅下降至仅15%,而拉丁美洲其他地区的贫困率则高达40%。如今的圣地亚哥是安第斯山脉的璀璨之城,堪称整个南美洲最繁荣、最具吸引力的城市。

There is a shadow side to the system, to be sure. The administrative and fiscal costs of the system are sometimes said to be too high.66 Since not everyone in the economy has a regular full-time job, not everyone ends up participating in the system. The self-employed were not obliged to contribute to Personal Retirement Accounts, and the casually employed do not contribute either. That leaves a substantial proportion of the population with no pension coverage at all, including many of the people living in La Victoria, once a hotbed of popular resistance to the Pinochet regime – and still the kind of place where Che Guevara’s face is spray-painted on the walls. On the other hand, the government stands ready to make up the difference for those whose savings do not suffice to pay a minimum pension, provided they have done at least twenty years of work. And there is also a Basic Solidarity pension for those who do not qualify for this.67 Above all, the improvement in Chile’s economic performance since the Chicago Boys’ reforms is very hard to argue with. The growth rate in the fifteen years before Friedman’s visit was 0.17 per cent. In the fifteen years that followed, it was 3.28 per cent, nearly twenty times higher. The poverty rate has declined dramatically to just 15 per cent, compared with 40 per cent in the rest of Latin America.68 Santiago today is the shining city of the Andes, easily the continent’s most prosperous and attractive city.

智利养老金改革的成功之处在于,其模式已被整个南美洲乃至全世界竞相效仿。玻利维亚、萨尔瓦多和墨西哥完全照搬了智利的方案。秘鲁和哥伦比亚则引入了私人养老金,作为国家养老金体系的替代方案。哈萨克斯坦也效仿了智利的做法。甚至连英国议员也纷纷从威斯敏斯特前往皮涅拉的办公室。具有讽刺意味的是,智利的改革远比美国——自由市场经济的心脏地带——迄今为止尝试过的任何改革都要激进得多。然而,无论人们是否愿意,福利改革终将席卷北美。

It is a sign of Chile’s success that the country’s pension reforms have been imitated all across the continent, and indeed around the world. Bolivia, El Salvador and Mexico copied the Chilean scheme to the letter. Peru and Colombia introduced private pensions as an alternative to the state system.69 Kazakhstan, too, has followed the Chilean example. Even British MPs have beaten a path from Westminster to Piñera’s door. The irony is that the Chilean reform was far more radical than anything that has been attempted in the United States, the heartland of free market economics. Yet welfare reform is coming to North America, whether anyone wants it or not.


卡特里娜飓风袭击新奥尔良时,它暴露了美国体制中一些许多人一直试图忽视的现实。没错,美国有福利国家。不,它运转不畅。里根和克林顿政府都推行了看似激进的福利改革,削减了失业救济金及其领取期限。但无论进行多少改革,都无法使福利体系免受美国人口老龄化和私人医疗保健成本飙升的影响。

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, it laid bare some realities about the American system that many people had been doing their best to ignore. Yes, America had a welfare state. No, it didn’t work. The Reagan and Clinton administrations had implemented what seemed like radical welfare reforms, reducing unemployment benefits and the periods for which they could be claimed. But no amount of reform could insulate the system from the ageing of the American population and the spiralling cost of private health care.

美国的福利制度独具特色。社会保障为所有退休人员提供最低限度的国家养老金,同时,医疗保险制度承担老年人和残疾人的所有医疗费用。收入补助和其他医疗支出使联邦福利项目的总成本高达GDP的11%。然而,美国的医疗保健几乎完全由私营部门提供。其最佳水平堪称一流,但价格却远非低廉。而且,如果你想在退休前接受治疗,你需要一份私人保险——据估计,47%的退休人员需要购买此类保险。数百万美国人无法享受到这些福利,因为此类政策往往只适用于那些拥有正规正式工作的人。其结果是,美国的福利体系不够全面,再分配能力远不及欧洲体系,但成本仍然极其高昂。自1993年以来,社会保障的支出一直高于国家安全。公共教育支出占GDP的比例(5.9%)高于英国、德国或日本。公共卫生支出约占GDP的7%,与英国持平;但私人医疗保健支出占比更高(8.5%,而英国仅为1.1%)。70

The US has a unique welfare system. Social Security provides a minimal state pension to all retirees, while at the same time the Medicare system covers all the health costs of the elderly and disabled. Income support and other health expenditures push up the total cost of federal welfare programmes to 11 per cent of GDP. American healthcare, however, is almost entirely provided by the private sector. At its best it is state-of-the-art, but it is very far from cheap. And, if you want treatment before you retire, you need a private insurance policy – something an estimated 47 million Americans do not have, since such policies tend to be available only to those in regular, formal employment. The result is a welfare system which is not comprehensive, is much less redistributive than European systems, but is still hugely expensive. Since 1993 Social Security has been more expensive than National Security. Public expenditure on education is higher as a percentage of GDP (5.9 per cent) than in Britain, Germany or Japan. Public health expenditures are equivalent to around 7 per cent of GDP, the same as in Britain; but private health care spending accounts for more (8.5 per cent, compared with a paltry 1.1 per cent in Britain).70

这样的福利体系难以应对申领人数的快速增长。但这正是美国人面临的现实:二战后出生的所谓“婴儿潮”一代开始陆续退休。 71据联合国预测,从现在到2050年,美国男性预期寿命可能从75岁提高到80岁。未来四十年,美国65岁及以上人口的比例预计将从12%上升到近21%。不幸的是,许多即将退休的人并没有为退休后的生活做好充分的准备。根据2006年的退休信心调查,十分之六的美国劳动者表示他们正在为退休储蓄,但只有十分之四的人表示他们实际计算过自己应该储蓄多少。许多储蓄不足的人认为,延长工作年限就能弥补退休储蓄的不足。普通劳动者计划工作到65岁,但实际上他们往往在62岁就退休了;事实上,大约十分之四的美国劳动者最终比原计划更早离开职场。 72这对联邦预算有着严重的后果,因为那些做出这种错误估计的人最终很可能以某种方式给纳税人造成负担。如今,普通退休人员每年领取的社会保障、医疗保险和医疗补助总额为21,000美元。将这个数字乘以目前3600万老年人口,就不难理解为什么这些项目会消耗如此巨大的资金。联邦税收收入的很大一部分都用于支付医疗费用。而且,这一比例势必会上升,这不仅是因为退休人数不断增加,还因为诸如医疗保险(Medicare)之类的福利成本已经失控,其增长速度是通货膨胀率的两倍。2003年将处方药纳入医疗保险范围更是雪上加霜。据一位名叫托马斯·R·萨文(Thomas R. Saving)的医疗保险受托人预测,到2019年,仅医疗保险一项的成本就将占联邦所得税总额的24%。目前的数据还表明,联邦政府的未偿债务远高于官方数据所显示的数额。美国政府问责局(GAO)最新估计,因未来社会保障和医疗保险福利资金不足而产生的隐性“风险敞口”高达34万亿美元。 73这几乎是官方公布的联邦债务规模的四倍。

Such a welfare system is ill prepared to cope with a rapid increase in the number of claimants. But that is precisely what Americans face as the members of the so-called ‘Baby Boomer’ generation, born after the Second World War, begin to retire.71 According to the United Nations, between now and 2050 male life expectancy in the United States is likely to rise from 75 to 80. Over the next forty years, the share of the American population that is aged 65 or over is projected to rise from 12 per cent to nearly 21 per cent. Unfortunately, many of the soon-to-be-retired have made inadequate provision for life after work. According to the 2006 Retirement Confidence Survey, six in ten American workers say they are saving for retirement and just four in ten say they have actually calculated how much they should be saving. Many of those without sufficient savings imagine that they will compensate by working for longer. The average worker plans to work until age 65. But it turns out that he or she actually ends up retiring at 62; indeed, around four in ten American workers end up leaving the workforce earlier than they planned.72 This has grave implications for the federal budget, since those who make these miscalculations are likely to end up a charge on taxpayers in one way or another. Today the average retiree receives Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits totalling $21,000 a year. Multiply this by the current 36 million elderly and you see why these programmes already consume such a large proportion of federal tax revenues. And that proportion is bound to rise, not only because the number of retirees is going up but also because the costs of benefits like Medicare are out of control, rising at double the rate of inflation. The 2003 extension of Medicare to cover prescription drugs only made matters worse. According to one projection, by the aptly named Medicare Trustee Thomas R. Saving, the cost of Medicare alone will absorb 24 per cent of all federal income taxes by 2019. Current figures also imply that the federal government has much larger unfunded liabilities than official data imply. The Government Accountability Office’s latest estimate of the implicit ‘exposures’ arising from unfunded future Social Security and Medicare benefits is $34 trillion.73 That is nearly four times the size of the official federal debt.

具有讽刺意味的是,人口老龄化问题对经济的影响比美国更为严重的,只有一个国家就是日本。日本的“福利超级大国”政策非常成功,到20世纪70年代,日本的预期寿命已成为世界上最长的国家。但与此同时,出生率却在下降,这导致了……日本是世界上老龄化程度最高的国家,超过21%的人口年龄已超过65岁。据仲前国际经济研究所预测,到2044年,老年人口将与劳动人口持平。 74因此,日本目前正面临着福利体系的深刻结构性危机,该体系的设计并未考虑到日本人所谓的“长寿社会”(chôju shakai)。75尽管提高了退休年龄,但政府尚未解决国家养老金制度的问题。(雪上加霜的是,许多个体经营者和学生——更不用说一些知名政客——未能缴纳应缴的社会保障金。)与此同时,公共医疗保险机构自20世纪90年代初以来一直处于亏损状态。 76日本的福利预算目前相当于税收收入的四分之三。其债务超过1000亿日元,约占GDP的170%。 77然而,私营部门机构的状况也好不到哪里去。自1990年股市崩盘以来,人寿保险公司一直举步维艰;1997年至2000年间,三家大型保险公司相继倒闭。养老基金也同样处境艰难。由于大多数发达国家都在朝着同一个方向发展,这赋予了那首20世纪80年代关于“变身日本”的流行歌曲新的含义。全球最大的养老基金(包括日本政府养老基金、荷兰养老基金和加州公共雇员养老基金)的资产总额现已超过10万亿美元,在2004年至2007年间增长了60%。它们的负债最终是否会增长到如此庞大的规模,以至于即使是这些巨额资金也无济于事呢?

Ironically, there’s only one country where the problem of an ageing population has more serious economic implications than the United States. That country is Japan. So successful was the Japanese ‘welfare superpower’ that by the 1970s life expectancy in Japan had become the longest in the world. But that, combined with a falling birth rate, has produced the world’s oldest society, with more than 21 per cent of the population already over the age of 65. According to Nakamae International Economic Research, the elderly population will be equal to that of the working population by 2044.74 As a result, Japan is now grappling with a profound structural crisis of its welfare system, which was not designed to cope with what the Japanese call the longevity society (chôju shakai).75 Despite raising the retirement age, the government has not yet resolved the problems of the state pension system. (Matters are not helped by the fact that many self-employed people and students – not to mention some eminent politicians – are failing to make their required social security contributions.) Public health insurers, meanwhile, have been in deficit since the early 1990s.76 Japan’s welfare budget is now equal to three quarters of tax revenues. Its debt exceeds one quadrillion yen, around 170 per cent of GDP.77 Yet private sector institutions are in no better shape. Life insurance companies have been struggling since the 1990 stock market crash; three major insurers failed between 1997 and 2000. Pension funds are in equally dire straits. As most countries in the developed world are moving in the same direction, it gives a new meaning to that old 1980s pop song about ‘turning Japanese’. Assets at the world’s largest pension funds (which include the Japanese government’s own fund, its Dutch counterpart and the California Public Employees’ fund) now exceed $10 trillion, having risen by 60 per cent between 2004 and 2007.78 But are their liabilities ultimately going to grow so large that perhaps even these huge sums will not suffice?

寿命延长对个人来说是好事,但对福利国家和必须说服选民进行改革的政治家来说却是坏消息。更糟糕的是,尽管世界人口老龄化日益加剧,但世界本身可能也变得更加危险。79

Longer life is good news for individuals, but it is bad news for the welfare state and the politicians who have to persuade voters to reform it. The even worse news is that, even as the world’s population is getting older, the world itself may be getting more dangerous.79

已对冲和未对冲

The Hedged and the Unhedged

如果随着基地组织继续寻求大规模杀伤性武器,国际恐怖主义袭击更加频繁和/或更具致命性,那会怎样?事实上,我们有充分的理由对此感到担忧。鉴于2001年袭击事件的影响相对有限,基地组织有强烈的动机发动“核9·11”袭击。 80该组织的发言人并未否认这一点;相反,他们公开吹嘘其野心是“杀死400万美国人——其中200万是儿童——并流亡两倍于此的人数,以及致残数十万人”。 81这绝非空谈。哈佛大学贝尔弗中心的格雷厄姆·艾利森表示,“如果美国和其他国家政府继续沿用目前的做法,那么到2014年,在某个大城市发生核恐怖袭击的可能性将大大增加”。氢弹设计者之一理查德·加文认为,包括美国和欧洲城市在内,每年发生核爆炸的概率已达20%。艾利森的同事马修·邦恩估计,未来十年发生核恐怖袭击的概率为29%。 82即使是一枚小型核装置,当量为12.5千吨,如果在美国一座普通城市引爆,也会造成多达8万人死亡;一枚100万吨级的氢弹则可能造成多达190万人死亡。使用炭疽芽孢的生物袭击如果成功,其致命性几乎与核爆炸相当。 83 如果全球变暖导致自然灾害频发呢?这一点也令人担忧。政府间气候变化专门委员会(IPCC)的科学专家指出,由于人为造成的全球变暖,“大多数地区强降水事件的频率有所增加”。还有“观测证据表明,自1970年以来,北大西洋强热带气旋活动有所增加”。政府间气候变化专门委员会(IPCC)预测的海平面上升势必会加剧卡特里娜飓风等风暴造成的洪灾损失。并非所有科学家都认同美国大西洋沿岸飓风活动正在增加的观点(正如阿尔·戈尔在其纪录片《难以忽视的真相》中所声称的那样)。但这显然,轻率地假设情况并非如此是错误的,尤其是在脆弱州住宅建设持续增长的情况下。对于那些已经因不断增长的福利支出而摇摇欲坠的政府而言,灾难发生的频率或规模的增加可能会造成致命的财政打击。9/11事件造成的保险(和再保险)损失约为300亿至580亿美元,与卡特里娜飓风造成的保险损失相近。 85在这两起事件中,美国联邦政府都不得不介入,帮助私人保险公司履行其承诺:在9/11事件后提供紧急联邦恐怖主义保险,并承担墨西哥湾沿岸大部分紧急救援和重建费用。换句话说,正如世界大战期间一样,当保险公司不堪重负时,福利国家会介入。但在自然灾害的情况下,这却产生了意想不到的后果。实际上,居住在相对安全地区的纳税人正在补贴那些选择居住在飓风易发地区的人们。纠正这种不平衡的一种可能方法是建立一个联邦再保险计划,以应对特大灾害。保险公司无需让纳税人承担重大灾害的费用,而是收取不同的保费(距离飓风区越近,保费越高),通过政府的再保险来转移风险,从而避免再次发生类似卡特里娜飓风的灾难。86还有另一种方法。

What if international terrorism strikes more frequently and/or lethally, as Al Qaeda continues its quest for weapons of mass destruction? There is in fact good reason to fear this. Given the relatively limited impact of the 2001 attacks, Al Qaeda has a strong incentive to attempt a ‘nuclear 9/11’.80 The organization’s spokesmen do not deny this; on the contrary, they openly boast of their ambition ‘to kill 4 million Americans – 2 million of them children – and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands’.81 This cannot be dismissed as mere rhetoric. According to Graham Allison, of Harvard University’s Belfer Center, ‘if the US and other governments just keep doing what they are doing today, a nuclear terrorist attack in a major city is more likely than not by 2014’. In the view of Richard Garwin, one of the designers of the hydrogen bomb, there is already a ‘20 per cent per year probability of a nuclear explosion with American cities and European cities included’. Another estimate, by Allison’s colleague Matthew Bunn, puts the odds of a nuclear terrorist attack over a ten-year period at 29 per cent.82 Even a small 12.5-kiloton nuclear device would kill up to 80,000 people if detonated in an average American city; a 1.0 megaton hydrogen bomb could kill as many as 1.9 million. A successful biological attack using anthrax spores could be nearly as lethal.83 What if global warming is increasing the incidence of natural disasters? Here, too, there are some grounds for unease. According to the scientific experts on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ‘the frequency of heavy precipitation events has increased over most areas’ as a result of man-made global warming. There is also ‘observational evidence of an increase in intense tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic since about 1970’. The rising sea levels forecast by the IPCC would inevitably increase the flood damage caused by storms like Katrina.84 Not all scientists accept the notion that hurricane activity along the US Atlantic coast is on the increase (as claimed by Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth). But it would clearly be a mistake blithely to assume that this is not the case, especially given the continued growth of residential construction in vulnerable states. For governments that are already tottering under the weight of ever-increasing welfare commitments, an increase in the frequency or scale of catastrophes could be fiscally fatal. The insurance (and reinsurance) losses arising from the 9/11 attacks were in the region of $30–58 billion, close to the insurance losses due to Katrina.85 In both cases, the US federal government had to step in to help private insurers meet their commitments, providing emergency federal terrorism insurance in the aftermath of 9/11, and absorbing the bulk of the costs of emergency relief and reconstruction along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. In other words, just as happened during the world wars, the welfare state steps in when the insurers are overwhelmed. But this has a perverse result in the case of natural disasters. In effect, taxpayers in relatively safer parts of the country are subsidizing those who choose to live in hurricane-prone regions. One possible way of correcting this imbalance would be to create a federal reinsurance programme to cover mega-catastrophes. Rather than looking to taxpayers to pick up the tab for big disasters, insurers would charge differential premiums (higher for those closest to hurricane zones), laying off the risk of another Katrina by reinsuring the risk through the government.86 But there is another way.


保险和福利并非抵御未来冲击的唯一途径。明智的做法是进行对冲。如今,几乎人人都听说过对冲基金,例如肯尼斯·C·格里芬(Kenneth C. Griffin)在芝加哥创立的城堡投资集团(Citadel)。作为城堡投资集团的创始人,格里芬目前管理着约160亿美元的资产,该集团如今已跻身全球二十大对冲基金之列。这些资产中包含许多所谓的“不良资产”,格里芬以极低的价格从安然(Enron)等破产公司手中购得。毫不夸张地说,肯·格里芬热爱风险。他以不确定性为生。自从他开始交易以来,他一直致力于应对各种风险。从哈佛大学本科宿舍时期就开始投资可转换债券,他一直沉浸在“肥尾效应”的诱惑中。自1998年以来,城堡投资集团(Citadel)的主要离岸基金年均收益率高达21%。 87 2007年,当其他金融机构在信贷危机中损失数十亿美元时,他个人却赚得超过10亿美元。在他位于北密歇根大道顶层公寓的装饰艺术品中,包括他花费8000万美元购得的贾斯珀·约翰斯(Jasper Johns)的《虚假开始》(False Start)和一幅价值6000万美元的塞尚(Cézanne)作品。格里芬结婚时,婚礼在凡尔赛宫举行(指的是法国凡尔赛宫,而不是伊利诺伊州同名的小镇)。 88 在充满风险的世界里,对冲显然是一门好生意。但它究竟是什么意思?它又是从何而来呢?

Insurance and welfare are not the only way of buying protection against future shocks. The smart way to do it is by being hedged. Everyone today has heard of hedge funds like Kenneth C. Griffin’s Chicago-based Citadel. As founder of the Citadel Investment Group, now one of the twenty biggest hedge funds in the world, Griffin currently manages around $16 billion in assets. Among them are many so-called distressed assets, which Griffin picks up from failed companies like Enron for knock-down prices. It would not be too much to say that Ken Griffin loves risk. He lives and breathes uncertainty. Since he began trading convertible bonds from his Harvard undergraduate dormitory, he has feasted on ‘fat tails’. Citadel’s main offshore fund has generated annual returns of 21 per cent since 1998.87 In 2007, when other financial institutions were losing billions in the credit crunch, he personally made more than a billion dollars. Among the artworks that decorate his penthouse apartment on North Michigan Avenue is Jasper Johns’s False Start, for which he paid $80 million, and a Cézanne which cost him $60 million. When Griffin got married, the wedding was at Versailles (the French château, not the small Illinois town of the same name).88 Hedging is clearly a good business in a risky world. But what exactly does it mean, and where did it come from?

套期保值策略的起源,顾名思义,与农业息息相关。对于播种的农民来说,没有什么比收割后运往市场的价格更重要的了。但实际价格可能低于预期,也可能高于预期。期货合约允许农民通过与商人签订合约来保护自己,约定商人在作物上市时以播种时商定的价格购买。如果交割日的市场价格低于预期,农民的损失就能得到保障;而出售合约的商人自然希望价格更高,从而从中获利。随着美国大草原被开垦耕种,运河和铁路将其与东北部工业化大城市连接起来,大草原逐渐成为美国的粮仓。但供求关系,以及由此而来的价格,波动剧烈。 1858年1月至1867年5月间,受南北战争的影响,小麦价格从每蒲式耳55美分飙升至2.88美元,随后在1870年3月回落至77美分。最早的农民保护措施是远期合约,它只是买卖双方之间的双边协议。然而,真正的期货合约是由期货交易所发行的标准化金融工具,因此可以进行交易。随着标准“到货”期货合约的制定,以及一套结算规则的建立和高效清算机构的建立,第一个真正的期货市场诞生了。它的诞生地是温迪。城市:芝加哥。1874年,芝加哥农产品交易所(现今芝加哥商品交易所的前身)的成立,为美国商品市场的“套期保值”提供了场所。89

The origins of hedging, appropriately enough, are agricultural. For a farmer planting a crop, nothing is more crucial than the price it will fetch after it has been harvested and taken to market. But that could be lower than he expects or higher. A futures contract allows him to protect himself by committing a merchant to buy his crop when it comes to market at a price agreed when the seeds are being planted. If the market price on the day of delivery is lower than expected, the farmer is protected; the merchant who sells him the contract naturally hopes it will be higher, leaving him with a profit. As the American prairies were ploughed and planted, and as canals and railways connected them to the major cities of the industrial Northeast, they became the nation’s breadbasket. But supply and demand, and hence prices, fluctuated wildly. Between January 1858 and May 1867, partly as a result of the Civil War, the price of wheat soared from 55 cents to $2.88 per bushel, before plummeting back to 77 cents in March 1870. The earliest forms of protection for farmers were known as forward contracts, which were simply bilateral agreements between seller and buyer. A true futures contract, however, is a standardized instrument issued by a futures exchange and hence tradable. With the development of a standard ‘to arrive’ futures contract, along with a set of rules to enforce settlement and, finally, an effective clearinghouse, the first true futures market was born. Its birthplace was the Windy City: Chicago. The creation of a permanent futures exchange in 1874 – the Chicago Produce Exchange, the ancestor of today’s Chicago Mercantile Exchange – created a home for ‘hedging’ in the US commodity markets.89

纯粹的套期保值可以完全消除价格风险。它需要投机者作为交易对手来承担风险。然而,在实践中,大多数套期保值者往往会进行一定程度的投机活动,寻找从未来价格波动中获利的方法。部分原因是公众对此感到不安——认为期货市场与赌场无异——直到20世纪70年代,货币和利率期货才得以发行;而股票期货合约直到1982年才成为可能。

A pure hedge eliminates price risk entirely. It requires a speculator as a counter-party to take on the risk. In practice, however, most hedgers tend to engage in some measure of speculative activity, looking for ways to profit from future price movements. Partly because of public unease about this – the feeling that futures markets were little better than casinos – it was not until the 1970s that futures could also be issued for currencies and interest rates; and not until 1982 that futures contracts on the stock market became possible.

在 Citadel,格里芬汇聚了数学家、物理学家、工程师、投资分析师和先进的计算机技术专家。他们所做的一些工作,堪称金融界的火箭科学。但其基本原理却很简单。由于所有期货合约都源于标的资产的价值,因此它们都是“衍生品”。与期货密切相关但又有所区别的是期权这种金融合约。本质上,看涨期权的买方有权(但无义务)在特定时间(到期日)以特定价格(称为行权价)从期权的卖方(“期权发行人”)处购买约定数量的特定商品或金融资产。显然,看涨期权的买方预期商品或标的资产的价格在未来会上涨。当价格超过约定的行权价时,期权就“价内”了——而购买期权的精明投资者也因此获利颇丰。看跌期权则恰恰相反:买方有权(但无义务)向期权卖方出售约定数量的标的物。第三种衍生品是互换,它实际上是双方对未来利率走势等进行的一种押注。纯粹的利率互换允许已经获得利息收入的双方进行利息互换,使得获得浮动利率的一方可以在利率下降时将其转换为固定利率。信用违约互换,与此同时,它还能提供对冲公司债券违约风险的保护。然而,或许最引人入胜的衍生品是天气衍生品,例如自然灾害债券。这类债券允许保险公司和其他机构通过向费马资本等对冲基金出售所谓的尾部风险来抵消极端气温或自然灾害的影响。实际上,“巨灾债券”的买方是在出售保险;如果债券中规定的灾害发生,买方必须支付约定的金额,否则将损失本金。作为回报,卖方支付可观的利息。2006年,天气风险衍生品的总名义价值约为450亿美元。

At Citadel, Griffin has brought together mathematicians, physicists, engineers, investment analysts and advanced computer technology. Some of what they do is truly the financial equivalent of rocket science. But the underlying principles are simple. Because they are all derived from the value of underlying assets, all futures contracts are forms of ‘derivative’. Closely related, though distinct from futures, are the financial contracts known as options. In essence, the buyer of a call option has the right, but not the obligation, to buy an agreed quantity of a particular commodity or financial asset from the seller (‘writer’) of the option at a certain time (the expiration date) for a certain price (known as the strike price). Clearly, the buyer of a call option expects the price of the commodity or underlying instrument to rise in the future. When the price passes the agreed strike price, the option is ‘in the money’ – and so is the smart guy who bought it. A put option is just the opposite: the buyer has the right, but not the obligation, to sell an agreed quantity of something to the seller of the option. A third kind of derivative is the swap, which is effectively a bet between two parties on, for example, the future path of interest rates. A pure interest rate swap allows two parties already receiving interest payments literally to swap them, allowing someone receiving a variable rate of interest to exchange it for a fixed rate, in case interest rates decline. A credit default swap, meanwhile, offers protection against a company’s defaulting on its bonds. Perhaps the most intriguing kind of derivative, however, are the weather derivatives like natural catastrophe bonds, which allow insurance companies and others to offset the effects of extreme temperatures or natural disasters by selling the so-called tail risk to hedge funds like Fermat Capital. In effect, the buyer of a ‘cat bond’ is selling insurance; if the disaster specified in the bond happens, the buyer has to pay out an agreed sum or forfeit his principal. In return, the seller pays an attractive rate of interest. In 2006 the total notional value of weather-risk derivatives was around $45 billion.

曾几何时,大多数此类衍生品都是由芝加哥商品交易所等交易所生产的标准化工具,芝加哥商品交易所更是开创了天气衍生品市场。然而,如今绝大多数衍生品都是定制的,并通过场外交易(OTC)出售,通常由银行负责,这些银行会收取丰厚的佣金。据国际清算银行统计,截至2007年12月,场外衍生品合约(由双方临时安排)的未偿名义总额高达惊人的596万亿美元,总市值略高于14.5万亿美元。*尽管沃伦·巴菲特等较为传统的投资者曾将它们称为金融大规模杀伤性武器(尽管巴菲特本人也曾使用过这些工具),但在2007年的芝加哥,人们普遍认为世界经济体系从未像现在这样能够更好地抵御意外事件——然而,这种观点在第二年就被残酷地打破了:对冲基金的平均亏损超过21%,而城堡投资集团的基金更是暴跌了55%。

There was a time when most such derivatives were standardized instruments produced by exchanges like the Chicago Mercantile, which has pioneered the market for weather derivatives. Now, however, the vast proportion are custom-made and sold ‘over-the-counter’ (OTC), often by banks which charge attractive commissions for their services. According to the Bank for International Settlements, the total notional amounts outstanding of OTC derivative contracts – arranged on an ad hoc basis between two parties – reached a staggering $596 trillion in December 2007, with a gross market value of just over $14.5 trillion.* Though they have famously been called financial weapons of mass destruction by more traditional investors like Warren Buffett (who has, nonetheless, made use of them), the view in Chicago in 2007 was that the world’s economic system had never been better protected against the unexpected – a view rudely shattered the following year when the average hedge fund lost more than 21 per cent, and Citadel’s funds plunged 55 per cent.

然而,事实仍然是,这场金融革命实际上已经将世界一分为二:一部分人已经(或能够)进行对冲,而另一部分人则没有(或无法)进行对冲。你需要资金才能进行对冲。对冲基金通常要求最低投资额为六位数或七位数,并收取管理费。至少要拿出你资金的2%(Citadel的收费是这个数字的四倍)以及20%的利润。这意味着大多数大型企业都能负担得起对冲利率、汇率或商品价格意外上涨的风险。如果他们愿意,还可以通过出售巨灾债券和其他衍生品来对冲未来飓风或恐怖袭击的风险。相比之下,大多数普通家庭根本负担不起对冲,即使有能力也不知道该如何操作。我们这些普通人仍然只能依靠相对简单粗暴且往往价格昂贵的保险单来保护自己免受生活中突如其来的不幸;或者寄希望于社会福利来拯救我们。

The fact nevertheless remains that this financial revolution has effectively divided the world in two: those who are (or can be) hedged, and those who are not (or cannot be). You need money to be hedged. Hedge funds typically ask for a minimum six- or seven-figure investment and charge a management fee of at least 2 per cent of your money (Citadel charges four times that) and 20 per cent of the profits. That means that most big corporations can afford to be hedged against unexpected increases in interest rates, exchange rates or commodity prices. If they want to, they can also hedge against future hurricanes or terrorist attacks by selling cat bonds and other derivatives. By comparison, most ordinary households cannot afford to hedge at all and would not know how to even if they could. We lesser mortals still have to rely on the relatively blunt and often expensive instrument of insurance policies to protect us against life’s nasty surprises; or hope for the welfare state to ride to the rescue.

当然,还有第三种更简单的策略:那就是老一套的未雨绸缪。或者更确切地说,是借钱购买资产,希望这些资产未来的升值能够抵御灾难。近年来,对许多家庭来说,应对不确定的未来采取了一种非常简单的投资方式——购置房产(通常是杠杆投资,也就是借贷),他们希望房产的价值能够持续增长,直到家庭经济支柱退休的那一天。如果养老金不够用,也不用担心。如果医疗保险到期,也不要惊慌。反正还有家,温馨的家。

There is, of course, a third and much simpler strategy: the old one of simply saving for that rainy day. Or, rather, borrowing to buy assets whose future appreciation in value will supposedly afford a cushion against calamity. For many families in recent years, making provision for an uncertain future has taken the very simple form of an investment (usually leveraged, that is debt-financed) in a house, the value of which is supposed to keep increasing until the day the breadwinners need to retire. If the pension plan falls short, never mind. If you run out of health insurance, don’t panic. There is always home, sweet home.

然而,作为一种保险或养老金计划,这种策略存在一个非常明显的缺陷。它代表着对单一市场——房地产市场——的单向、完全无对冲的押注。不幸的是,正如我们将在下一章看到的,押注砖瓦水泥远不如投资房屋安全。而且,你无需住在新奥尔良就能切身体会到这一点。

As an insurance policy or a pension plan, however, this strategy has one very obvious flaw. It represents a one-way, totally unhedged bet on one market: the property market. Unfortunately, as we shall see in the next chapter, a bet on bricks and mortar is very far from being as safe as houses. And you do not need to live in New Orleans to find that out the hard way.

5

5

安全无虞

Safe as Houses

在英语世界,房地产是最受欢迎的经济游戏。没有任何其他金融领域能像房地产一样如此吸引大众的想象力。也没有任何其他资产配置决策能像房地产一样引发如此多的餐桌话题。房地产市场独一无二。每个成年人,无论经济知识多么匮乏,都会对它的未来前景发表看法。甚至孩子们在拥有自己的钱之前,就被教导如何一步步攀升房产阶梯。*而我们教导他们的方式,实际上就是玩一场房地产游戏。

It is the English-speaking world’s favourite economic game: property. No other facet of financial life has such a hold on the popular imagination. No other asset-allocation decision has inspired so many dinner-party conversations. The real estate market is unique. Every adult, no matter how economically illiterate, has a view on its future prospects. Even children are taught how to climb the property ladder, long before they have money of their own.* And the way we teach them is literally to play a property game.

我们今天所熟知的“大富翁”游戏,最初是由美国女性伊丽莎白·菲利普斯(昵称“莉齐”)于1903年设计的。莉齐是激进经济学家亨利·乔治的忠实拥趸。她设想的乌托邦世界,唯一的税收就是土地税。这款游戏的初衷是为了揭露社会制度的不公:少数地主从佃农收取的租金中牟取暴利。这款最初名为“地主游戏”的“大富翁”雏形,具备一些我们今天所熟悉的特征——例如连续的矩形路径和“入狱”角——但它显得过于复杂和说教,难以吸引大众。事实上,它的早期拥趸中包括两位特立独行的大学教授,分别是沃顿商学院的斯科特·尼尔林和……哥伦比亚大学的盖伊·塔格韦尔(Guy Tugwell)对这款游戏进行了修改,使其适用于课堂教学。一位名叫查尔斯·达罗(Charles Darrow)的失业水管工程师在朋友的介绍下接触到一款以新泽西州海滨度假胜地大西洋城街道为背景的版本后,发现了这款游戏的商业潜力。达罗重新设计了游戏版图,使每个地产方格上都有一条色彩鲜艳的横带,并手工雕刻了玩家可以在获得的方格上“建造”的小房子和酒店。达罗心灵手巧(他可以在八小时内完成一局游戏),而且他还具备推销员的“魄力”,成功说服费城百货公司约翰·沃纳梅克(John Wanamaker)和玩具零售商FAO Schwarz在1934年圣诞节期间购买他的游戏。很快,他的销量就超过了自己的产量。1935年,桌游公司帕克兄弟(​​Parker Brothers,该公司之前曾放弃过《地主游戏》)收购了他的公司

The game we know today as Monopoly was first devised in 1903 by an American woman, Elizabeth (‘Lizzie’) Phillips, a devotee of the radical economist Henry George. Her Utopian dream was of a world in which the only tax would be a levy on land values. The game’s intended purpose was to expose the iniquity of a social system in which a small minority of landlords profited from the rents they collected from tenants. Originally known as The Landlord’s Game, this proto-Monopoly had a number of familiar features – the continuous rectangular path, the Go to Jail corner – but it appeared too complex and didactic to have mass appeal. Indeed, its early adopters included a couple of eccentric university professors, Scott Nearing at Wharton and Guy Tugwell at Columbia, who modified it for classroom use. It was an unemployed plumbing engineer named Charles Darrow who saw the game’s commercial potential after he was introduced by friends to a version based on the streets of Atlantic City, the New Jersey seaside resort. Darrow redesigned the board so that each property square had a brightly coloured band across it and hand-carved the little houses and hotels that players could ‘build’ on the squares they acquired. Darrow was good with his hands (he could turn out a single game in eight hours), but he also had the salesman’s ‘moxie’, persuading the Philadelphia department store John Wanamaker and the toy retailer F. A. O. Schwarz to buy his game for the 1934 Christmas season. Soon he was selling more than he could make by himself. In 1935 the board-games company Parker Brothers (which had passed on the earlier Landlord’s Game) bought him out.1

在大萧条时期推出这款已经演变成面向潜在房产拥有者的游戏,似乎并非明智之举。但或许正是那些五颜六色的假钞,才让《大富翁》如此吸引人。“正如游戏名称所示,”帕克兄弟公司在1935年4月宣布:

The Great Depression might have seemed an unpropitious time to launch what had by now mutated into a game for would-be property owners. But perhaps all that fake multicoloured money was part of Monopoly’s appeal. ‘As the name of the game suggests,’ announced Parker Brothers in April 1935:

玩家们进行房地产、铁路和公共事业的交易,力图垄断某块土地,从而向其他玩家收取租金。当遇到诸如抵押贷款、税收、社区基金、期权、租金、利息、未开发房地产、酒店、公寓楼、电力公司以及其他交易等熟悉的问题时,游戏会变得异常刺激,而这些交易都需要使用代币货币

the players deal in real estate, railroads and public utilities in an endeavor to obtain a monopoly on a piece of property so as to obtain rent from the other players. Excitement runs high when such familiar problems are encountered as mortgages, taxes, a Community Chest, options, rentals, interest money, undeveloped real estate, hotels, apartment houses, power companies and other transactions, for which scrip money is supplied.2

这款游戏取得了巨大的成功。到1935年底,销量已达25万套。短短四年内,英国(我第一次玩的伦敦版就是沃丁顿公司出品的)、法国、德国、意大利和奥地利都推出了各自的版本——尽管法西斯政府对这款游戏如今毫不掩饰的资本主义本质最多也只是态度暧昧。到第二次世界大战时期,这款游戏已经风靡全球。英国情报部门可以利用红十字会提供的“大富翁”游戏棋盘,将包括地图和真钞在内的逃生工具包走私给被关押在德国战俘营的英国战俘。失业的美国人和被俘的英国人也出于同样的原因喜欢玩“大富翁”。现实生活中,生活或许艰难,但玩“大富翁”时,我们可以梦想着买下整条街道。这款游戏告诉我们,拥有房产是明智之举,这与游戏最初发明者的初衷完全背道而驰。你拥有的房产越多,赚的钱就越多。尤其在英语世界,人们普遍认为,没有什么比实物投资更划算。

The game was a phenomenal success. By the end of 1935 a quarter of a million sets had been sold. Within four years, versions had been created in Britain (where Waddington’s created the London version that I first played), France, Germany, Italy and Austria – though fascist governments were at best ambivalent about its now unapologetically capitalist character.3 By the time of the Second World War, the game was so ubiquitous that British intelligence could use Monopoly boards supplied by the Red Cross to smuggle escape kits – including maps and genuine European currencies – to British prisoners of war in German camps.4 Unemployed Americans and captive Britons enjoyed Monopoly for the same reason. In real life, times may be hard, but when we play Monopoly we can dream of buying whole streets. What the game tells us, in complete contradiction to its original inventor’s intention, is that it’s smart to own property. The more you own, the more money you make. In the English-speaking world particularly, it has become a truth universally acknowledged that nothing beats bricks and mortar as an investment.

“稳如磐石”:这句话足以说明为什么全世界的人都渴望拥有自己的房子。但在金融领域,这句话的含义更加精准。它意味着,没有什么比把钱借给拥有房产的人更安全的了。为什么?因为如果他们违约,你可以收回房子。即使他们逃跑了,房子也逃不掉。正如德国人所说,土地和建筑物是“不动产”。因此,在美国,新企业最重要的资金来源是企业家的房产抵押贷款,这绝非偶然。相应地,金融机构也越来越乐于向想要购房的人放贷。自1959年以来,美国未偿还的抵押贷款总额增长了75倍。到2006年底,美国自住业主所欠的贷款总额相当于美国国内生产总值的99%,而50年前这一比例仅为38%。借贷激增为住宅投资热潮提供了资金支持,该热潮在2005年达到了50年来的顶峰。一段时间内,新房供应似乎无法跟上不断增长的需求。2005年上半年美国GDP增长的约一半与住房相关。

‘Safe as houses’: the phrase tells you all you need to know about why people all over the world yearn to own their own homes. But that phrase means something more precise in the world of finance. It means that there is nothing safer than lending money to people with property. Why? Because if they default on the loan, you can repossess the house. Even if they run away, the house can’t. As the Germans say, land and buildings are ‘immobile’ property. So it is no coincidence that the single most important source of funds for a new business in the United States is a mortgage on the entrepreneur’s house. Correspondingly, financial institutions have become ever less inhibited about lending money to people who want to buy property. Since 1959, the total mortgage debt outstanding in the US has risen seventy-five fold. Altogether, American owner-occupiers owed a sum equivalent to 99 per cent of US gross domestic product by the end of 2006, compared with just 38 per cent fifty years before. This upsurge in borrowing helped to finance a boom in residential investment, which reached a fifty-year peak in 2005. For a time, the supply of new housing seemed unable to keep pace with accelerating demand. About half of all the growth in US GDP in the first half of 2005 was housing related.

英语世界对财产的热情也催生了一项政治实验:世界上首批真正意义上的财产所有制民主国家的建立,这些国家的人口在65%到65%之间。83%的家庭拥有自己居住的房屋。*换句话说,大多数选民也是房产所有者。有人认为这是全世界都应该效仿的模式。事实上,近年来这种模式发展迅速,房价飙升不仅发生在“英语国家”(澳大利亚、加拿大、爱尔兰、英国和美国),也发生在中国、法国、印度、意大利、俄罗斯、韩国和西班牙。2006年,经济合作与发展组织(OECD)18个成员国中有8个国家的名义房价通胀率超过10%。事实上,美国在2000年至2007年间并没有经历异常严重的房地产泡沫;荷兰和挪威的房价涨幅更大。5

The English-speaking world’s passion for property has also been the foundation for a political experiment: the creation of the world’s first true property-owning democracies, with between 65 and 83 per cent of households owning the home they live in.* A majority of voters, in other words, are also property owners. Some say this is a model the whole world should adopt. Indeed, in recent years it has been spreading fast, with house price booms not only in the ‘Anglosphere’ (Australia, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States), but also in China, France, India, Italy, Russia, South Korea and Spain. In 2006 nominal house price inflation exceeded 10 per cent in eight out of eighteen countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The United States did not in fact experience an exceptional housing bubble between 2000 and 2007; prices rose further in the Netherlands and Norway.5

但房产真的像房子一样安全吗?还是说房地产更像是一场摇摇欲坠的纸牌屋?

But is property really as safe as houses? Or is the real estate game more like a house of cards?

拥有财产的贵族

The Property-owning Aristocracy

如今,在英国和美国最贫困的地区,例如格拉斯哥东区或底特律东区,拥有房产已成为例外。然而,在历史的大部分时间里,拥有房产是贵族精英的专属特权。庄园连同荣誉头衔和政治特权一起父子相传。其他人只是租户,向房东缴纳租金。甚至选举权最初也与财产所有权挂钩。根据十五世纪通过的法令,在1832年之前的英国农村,只有男性拥有选举权。在特定郡县拥有年收入至少四十先令的永久产权土地的人,有权在该郡投票。这意味着,英格兰和威尔士最多只有43.5万人拥有这种投票权——其中大多数人通过错综复杂的庇护关系依附于最富有的地主。19世纪初,代表英格兰和威尔士在下议院的514名议员中,约有370人是由近180位地主赞助人选出的。超过五分之一的议员是贵族的儿子。

Home ownership is now the exception only in the poorest parts of Britain and the United States, like the East End of Glasgow or the East Side of Detroit. For most of history, however, it was the exclusive privilege of an aristocratic elite. Estates were passed down from father to son, along with honorific titles and political privileges. Everyone else was a mere tenant, paying rent to their landlord. Even the right to vote in elections was originally a function of property ownership. In rural England before 1832, according to statutes passed in the fifteenth century, only men who owned freehold property worth at least forty shillings a year in a particular county were entitled to vote there. That meant, at most, 435,000 people in England and Wales – the majority of whom were bound to the wealthiest landowners by an intricate web of patronage. Of the 514 Members of Parliament representing England and Wales in the House of Commons in the early 1800s, about 370 were selected by nearly 180 land-owning patrons. More than a fifth of MPs were the sons of peers.

从某种意义上说,英国自那时以来并没有发生太大变化。六千万英亩土地中,约有四千万英亩仅由18.9万个家族拥有。威斯敏斯特公爵仍然是英国第三大富豪,估计资产达70亿英镑;卡多根伯爵(26亿英镑)和霍华德·德·瓦尔登女男爵(16亿英镑)也位列富豪榜前五十名。不同之处在于,贵族不再垄断政治体系。最后一位担任首相的贵族是第十四代霍姆伯爵亚历克·道格拉斯-霍姆,他于1964年卸任(正如他所说,败给了“第十四代威尔逊先生”)。事实上,得益于上议院的改革,世袭贵族制度正在逐步从英国议会体系中消失。

In one respect, not much has changed in Britain since those days. Around forty million acres out of sixty million are owned by just 189,000 families.6 The Duke of Westminster remains the third-richest man in the UK, with estimated assets of £7 billion; also in the top fifty of the ‘rich list’ are Earl Cadogan (£2.6 billion) and Baroness Howard de Walden (£1.6 billion). The difference is that the aristocracy no longer monopolizes the political system. The last aristocrat to serve as Prime Minister was Alec Douglas-Home, the 14th Earl of Home, who left office in 1964 (defeated by, as he put it, ‘the 14th Mr Wilson’). Indeed, thanks to the reform of the House of Lords, the hereditary peerage is in the process of finally being phased out of the British parliamentary system.

贵族政治力量的衰落有多种解释,但其核心在于金融。直到19世纪30年代,财富一直眷顾着精英阶层,即大约30个年收入超过6万英镑的土地家族。在拿破仑战争期间,由于人口压力和战时通货膨胀的双重作用,小麦价格翻了一番,土地价值飙升。此后,工业化为那些恰好拥有煤田或城市地产的人带来了意外之财,而贵族对政治体系的统治则确保了他们从公共财政中获得源源不断的报酬。似乎这还不够,这些大亨们充分利用了他们的借贷能力。有些人借钱是为了“改善”他们的庄园,例如排干田地和圈占公共土地。另一些人则借钱来维持奢靡的生活方式。例如,德文郡公爵就花费了巨额资金。他们在19世纪的借贷规模如此庞大,以至于每年收入的40%到55%都用于支付利息。“你们真正需要的,”他们的一位律师抱怨道,“不过是自制力罢了。” 7

The decline of the aristocracy as a political force has been explained in many ways. At its heart, however, was finance. Until the 1830s fortune smiled on the elite, the thirty or so families with gross annual income from their lands above £60,000 a year. Land values had soared during the Napoleonic Wars, as the combination of demographic pressure and wartime inflation caused the price of wheat to double. Thereafter, industrialization brought windfalls to those who happened to be sitting on coalfields or urban real estate, while the aristocratic dominance of the political system ensured a steady stream of remuneration from the public purse. As if that were not enough, the great magnates took full advantage of their ability to borrow to the hilt. Some did so to ‘improve’ their estates, draining fields and enclosing common land. Others borrowed to finance a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption. The Dukes of Devonshire, for example, spent between 40 and 55 per cent of their annual income on interest payments, so enormous were their borrowings during the nineteenth century. ‘All that you want,’ complained one of their solicitors, ‘is the power of self-restraint.’7

问题在于,无论你拥有多少财产,它对借钱给你的人来说都只是一种保障。正如特罗洛普在《巴塞特郡的最后编年史》中德莫林斯小姐所说,“土地不会跑掉”。*这就是为什么十九世纪许多投资者——当地律师、​​私人银行和保险公司——都被抵押贷款这种看似无风险的投资所吸引。相比之下,借款人唯一能保障其财产免遭债权人收回的,就是他的收入。不幸的是,对于维多利亚时代英国的大地主来说,这种保障突然消失了。从19世纪40年代末开始,世界各地粮食产量增加、运输成本暴跌以及关税壁垒降低——以1846年废除《谷物法》为代表——这些因素共同削弱了地主的经济地位。随着粮食价格从1847年每蒲式耳3美元的峰值跌至1894年每蒲式耳50美分的谷底,农业用地的收入也随之锐减。农村地产的回报率从1845年的3.65%暴跌至1885年的2.51%。正如经济学人》所言:“没有任何一种保障曾被人们如此笃信,而近年来,也鲜有比英国土地更令人失望的保障。”对于那些在爱尔兰拥有庄园的人来说,日益加剧的政治动荡更是雪上加霜。建造了位于白金汉郡斯托庄园的家族的命运,便是这种经济衰退的典型例证。

The trouble is that property, no matter how much you own, is a security only to the person who lends you money. As Miss Demolines says in Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset, ‘the land can’t run away’.* This was why so many nineteenth-century investors – local solicitors, private banks and insurance companies – were attracted to mortgages as a seemingly risk-free investment. By contrast, the borrower’s sole security against the loss of his property to such creditors is his income. Unfortunately for the great landowners of Victorian Britain, that suddenly fell away. From the late 1840s onwards, the combination of increasing grain production around the world, plummeting transport costs and falling tariff barriers – exemplified by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 – eroded the economic position of landowners. As grain prices slid from a peak of $3 a bushel in 1847 to a nadir of 50 cents in 1894, so did the income from agricultural land. Rates of return on rural property slumped from 3.65 per cent in 1845 to just 2.51 per cent in 1885.8 As The Economist put it: ‘No security was ever relied upon with more implicit faith, and few have lately been found more sadly wanting than English land.’ For those with estates in Ireland, the problem was compounded by mounting political unrest. This economic decline and fall was exemplified by the fortunes of the family that built Stowe House, in Buckinghamshire.

斯托庄园的确有着令人叹为观止的壮丽景色。它拥有气势恢宏的柱廊、令人印象深刻的范布鲁式门廊以及斯托庄园拥有由著名建筑师“能手”布朗设计的迷人花园,是现存最精美的十八世纪贵族建筑之一。然而,如今的斯托庄园却缺少了些什么——或者说,缺少了很多东西。椭圆形大理石沙龙的每个壁龛里,曾经都摆放着一尊罗马式雕像。国事厅里华丽的乔治亚式壁炉已被廉价而矮小的维多利亚式壁炉所取代。曾经摆满精美家具的房间如今空空荡荡。为什么?答案是,这座庄园曾经属于第一次现代房地产崩盘中最杰出的受害者——理查德·普兰塔吉内特·坦普尔-纽金特-布里奇斯-钱多斯-格伦维尔,第六代科巴姆子爵和第二代白金汉公爵。

There is something undeniably magnificent about Stowe House. With its sweeping colonnades, its impressive Vanbrugh portico and its delightful ‘Capability’ Brown gardens, it is one of the finest surviving examples of eighteenth-century aristocratic architecture. Yet there is something missing from Stowe today – or rather many things. In each of the alcoves of the elliptical Marble Saloon, there was once a Romanesque statue. The splendid Georgian fireplaces in the State Rooms have been replaced by cheap and diminutive Victorian substitutes. Rooms that were once crammed full of the finest furniture now lie empty. Why? The answer is that this house once belonged to the most distinguished victim of the first modern property crash, Richard Plantagenet Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, 6th Viscount Cobham and 2nd Duke of Buckingham.

斯托庄园:贵族式的宏伟,抵押殆尽

Stowe House: aristocratic grandeur, mortgaged to the hilt

斯托庄园只是白金汉公爵及其先祖庞大地产帝国的一部分。在短短125年间,他们凭借政治庇护和联姻策略,从男爵晋升为公爵。9公爵总共拥有约67,000英亩土地英格兰、爱尔兰和牙买加。这似乎足以支撑他奢靡的生活方式。他花钱如流水,仿佛钱财随时可能过时:情妇、私生子、起诉岳父的遗嘱执行人、花钱买下嘉德勋章、反对《大改革法案》和废除《谷物法》——凡是他认为符合自己作为王国公爵和“土地的化身”身份的事情,他都毫不犹豫地去做。他以“抵制任何损害农业利益的措施,无论这些措施是由哪个政府提出的”而自豪。事实上,他宁愿辞去罗伯特·皮尔爵士政府的掌玺大臣一职,也不愿支持废除《谷物法》。然而,到了1845年——换句话说,甚至在19世纪中期谷物价格暴跌之前——他的债务就已经几乎让他不堪重负。他年总收入为72,000英镑,每年支出109,140英镑,累计债务高达1,027,282英镑。 11他的大部分收入都用于支付利息(部分债务的利率高达15%)和人寿保险费,而这份保单或许是债权人收回欠款的唯一希望。 12然而,他最终还是犯了一个致命的错误。

Stowe was only part of the vast empire of real estate acquired by the Duke of Buckingham and his ancestors, who had propelled themselves from a barony to a dukedom in the space of 125 years by a combination of political patronage and strategic marriage.9 In all, the Duke owned around 67,000 acres in England, Ireland and Jamaica. It seemed a more than adequate basis for his extravagant lifestyle. He spent money as if it might go out of fashion: on mistresses, on illegitimate children, on suing his father-in-law’s executors, on buying his way into the Order of the Garter, on opposing the Great Reform Bill and the Repeal of the Corn Laws – on anything he felt was compatible with his standing as a duke of the realm and the living embodiment of The Land. He prided himself on ‘resisting any measure injurious to the agricultural interests, no matter by what Government it should be brought forward’. Indeed, he resigned as Lord Privy Seal in Sir Robert Peel’s government rather than support Corn Law Repeal.10 By 1845, however – even before the mid-century slump in grain prices, in other words – his debts were close to overwhelming him. With a gross annual income of £72,000, he was spending £109,140 a year and had accumulated debts of £1,027,282.11 Most of his income was absorbed by interest payments (with rates on some of his debts as high as 15 per cent) and life insurance premiums on a policy that was probably his creditors’ best hope of seeing their money.12 Yet there was to be one final folly.

三代贵族:

Three generations of aristocracy:

左:理查德·格伦维尔,第一代白金汉公爵

LEFT: Richard Grenville, 1st Duke of Buckingham

中间:理查德·格伦维尔,第二代白金汉公爵

MIDDLE: Richard Grenville, 2nd Duke of Buckingham

右图:理查德·格伦维尔,第三代白金汉公爵

RIGHT: Richard Grenville, 3rd Duke of Buckingham

为了迎接维多利亚女王和阿尔伯特亲王1845年1月的盛大访问,公爵对斯托庄园进行了彻底的翻新。整座庄园摆满了当时最先进的豪华家具,甚至连皇家浴室里都铺着虎皮。维多利亚女王尖刻地评论道:“我的两座宫殿里可没有如此奢华。” 似乎这还不够,公爵自费召集了整个义勇骑兵团,在女王夫妇进入庄园时鸣放礼炮以示欢迎。四百名佃户骑马列队迎接,此外还有数百名衣着考究的劳工、三支铜管乐队以及一支从伦敦特地调来的警察队伍。这成了压垮公爵财政的最后一根稻草。为了避免家族彻底覆灭,白金汉公爵的儿子钱多斯侯爵被建议在成年后立即接管父亲的产业。经过一番痛苦的法律纠纷,侯爵最终占据了上风。14八月1848年,令公爵震惊的是,斯托庄园的所有物品都被拍卖了。如今,他祖传的庄园大开门面,大批寻宝者蜂拥而至,竞相出价购买盘子、葡萄酒、瓷器、艺术品和珍稀书籍,仿佛(正如《经济学人》杂志嘲讽的那样)公爵只是一个“破产的陶器商”。 15拍卖所得总额为75,000英镑。没有什么比这更能象征贵族衰落的新时代了。

In preparation for a much-sought-after visit by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in January 1845, the Duke refurbished Stowe House from top to bottom. The entire house was filled with the very latest in luxury furniture. There were even tiger skins in the royal bathroom. Queen Victoria remarked waspishly: ‘I have no such splendour in either of my two palaces.’ As if that were not enough, the Duke called out the entire Regiment of Yeomanry (at his own expense) to fire welcoming salvoes of artillery as the Queen and her Consort entered his estate. Four hundred tenants lined up on horseback to greet them, as well as several hundred smartly dressed labourers, three brass bands and a special detachment of police brought down from London for the day.13 It was the last straw for the ducal finances. To avert the complete ruin of the family, Buckingham’s son, the Marquis of Chandos, was advised to take control of his father’s estates as soon as he came of age. After painful legal wrangles, the son won the upper hand.14 In August 1848, to the Duke’s horror, the entire contents of Stowe House were auctioned off. Now his ancestral stately home was thrown open for throngs of bargain hunters to bid for the plate, the wine, the china, the works of art and the rare books, for all the world (as The Economist sneered) as if the Duke were ‘a bankrupt earthenware dealer’.15 The total proceeds from the sale were £75,000. Nothing could better have symbolized the new age of aristocratic decline.

他那饱受折磨、屡遭背叛的苏格兰妻子最终与他离婚,伦敦治安官没收了她所有的衣物,公爵被迫搬离斯托府,住进租来的住处。他只能在伦敦的卡尔顿俱乐部勉强糊口,期间写出了一系列极不可靠的回忆录,并且无可救药地追求女演员和别人的妻子。他曾经习惯了看似无限的透支额度,如今却愤愤不平地抱怨儿子只给他“勉强够得上一个拿着全额薪水、除了自己的开销之外别无其他的军官的薪水”:16

Divorced by his long-suffering, much-betrayed Scottish wife, whose entire wardrobe had been seized by sheriff’s officers in London, the Duke was forced to move out of Stowe House into rented lodgings. He eked out his days at his London club, the Carlton, writing a succession of highly unreliable memoirs and incorrigibly chasing actresses and other men’s wives. Accustomed to what had once seemed a limitless overdraft facility, he bitterly grumbled that his son allowed him ‘scarcely the pay of an officer upon full pay of my own rank who has nothing beyond his own expenses to pay for’:16

在危难之际,他强迫被忽视、遗弃和迫害的父亲来到世间……他继承了父亲的产业和财产,却损害了自己的利益,违背了一切荣誉和正义的原则……并且亲眼目睹了父亲的耻辱和屈辱。17

In the hour of distress [he] forced his Father into the world, neglected, forsaken & persecuted . . . Having got possession of his estates & property, [he] held them to his detriment & loss, & against every principle of honour and justice, & . . . lived to witness his Father’s dishonour and degradation.17

“你们发现我中毒被人毒害,还被人抢劫了,”他在卡尔顿酒店里逢人便诉苦。18 1861年,公爵最终去世时,正住在帕丁顿火车站附近的大西部酒店,靠儿子供养。颇具讽刺意味的是,他那更为节俭的儿子此时已是伦敦和西北铁路公司的董事长。19事实证明,在现代社会,一份稳定工作比继承的爵位更重要,无论你拥有多少土地。

‘You find me poisoned and robbed,’ he lamented to anyone at the Carlton who would listen.18 When the Duke finally expired in 1861 he was living at his son’s expense in the Great Western Hotel at Paddington railway station. Symbolically, his more parsimonious son was by now chairman of the London and North-Western Railway Company.19 In the modern world, it turned out, a regular job mattered more than an inherited title, no matter how many acres you owned.

白金汉公爵的倒台预示着一个崭新的民主时代的到来。1832年、1867年和1884年的选举改革法案削弱了贵族对英国政治的残余控制。到19世纪末,每年缴纳10英镑即可获得选举权。靠租房为生的人与每年拥有10英镑房产收入的人一样,都拥有合法的投票权。当时的选民人数为550万,占成年男性总数的40%。1918年,最后一项经济资格限制被取消,1928年后,所有成年男性和女性都获得了投票权。然而,普选权的到来并不意味着房产所有权的普及。恰恰相反:直到1938年,英国只有不到三分之一的住房由业主自住。第一个真正意义上的房产所有权民主制度将在大西洋彼岸诞生。而它正是在历史上最严重的金融危机中诞生的。

The fall of the Duke of Buckingham was a harbinger of a new, democratic age. Electoral reform acts in 1832, 1867 and 1884 eroded what remained of the aristocratic stranglehold on British politics. By the end of the nineteenth century, paying £10 a year in rent qualified you to vote just as legitimately as earning £10 a year from property. The electorate now numbered 5.5 million – 40 per cent of adult males. In 1918 that last economic qualification was finally removed and after 1928 all adults, male and female, had the vote. Yet the advent of universal suffrage did not mean that property ownership had become universal. On the contrary: as late as 1938, less than a third of the UK housing stock was in the hands of owner-occupiers. It was on the other side of the Atlantic that the first true property-owning democracy would emerge. And it would come out of the deepest financial crisis ever known.

住房民主

Home-owning Democracy

英国人常说,家就是他的城堡。美国人也深知这一点(正如《绿野仙踪》中的多萝西所说),没有比家更好的地方了——即便所有房子看起来都大同小异。但英美高度依赖房产的家庭模式的起源,既在于政府政策,也在于文化。如果说基于精英阶层财产所有权的旧阶级制度是英国的显著特征,那么财产所有制民主则是在美国形成的。

An Englishman’s home is his castle, or so the saying goes. Americans, too, know that (as Dorothy says in The Wizard of Oz) there’s no place like home – even if the homes do all look rather similar. But the origins of the Anglo-American model of the highly geared home-owning family lie as much in the realm of government policy as in the realm of culture. If the old class system based on elite property ownership was distinctively British, the property-owning democracy was made in America.

在20世纪30年代之前,只有略超过五分之二的美国家庭拥有自己的住房。除非你是农民,否则抵押贷款是例外,而非普遍现象。20世纪20年代,少数借钱买房的人在大萧条来袭时陷入了困境,尤其是当家庭的主要经济支柱是数百万失业者之一时。抵押贷款期限较短,通常为三到五年,而且不进行摊销。换句话说,借款人只需支付利息,无需偿还借款本金,直到贷款期满才需要支付,因此最终往往要一次性支付巨额尾款。20世纪20年代,抵押贷款利率与高等级公司债券收益率之间的平均利差约为两个百分点,而当时的平均利差约为0.5个百分点。过去二十年间,抵押贷款利率上涨了50个基点。此外,各地区的抵押贷款利率也存在显著差异。20经济急剧下滑时,紧张的贷款机构干脆拒绝续贷。1932年和1933年,止赎房屋超过50万套。到1933年中期,每天有超过1000套抵押贷款被止赎。房价暴跌超过五分之一。21建筑业崩溃,这揭示了(如同20世纪之后的所有经济衰退一样)美国整体经济在多大程度上依赖住宅投资作为增长引擎。22虽然大萧条对农村的影响或许最为严重,那里的地价跌至1920年峰值的一半以下,但美国城市的困境也好不到哪里去。租户们也难以支付房租,因为他们唯一的收入来源是救济金。例如,在底特律,汽车工业的工人数量只有1929年的一半,工资也只有一半。如今,我们几乎难以想象大萧条的影响:普遍失业带来的悲惨境遇,救济食堂的窘迫,以及人们为了寻找根本不存在的工作而四处奔波的绝望。到了1932年,大萧条时期失去一切的人们已经忍无可忍了。

Before the 1930s, little more than two fifths of American households were owner-occupiers. Unless you were a farmer, mortgages were the exception, not the rule. The few people who did borrow money to buy their own houses in the 1920s found themselves in deep difficulties when the Great Depression struck, especially if the main breadwinner was among the millions who lost their jobs and their incomes. Mortgages were short-term, usually for three to five years, and they were not amortized. In other words, people paid interest, but did not repay the sum they had borrowed (the principal) until the end of the loan’s term, so that they ended up facing a balloon-sized final payment. The average difference (spread) between mortgage rates and high-grade corporate bond yields was about two percentage points during the 1920s, compared with about half a per cent (50 basis points) in the past twenty years. There were substantial regional variations in mortgage rates, too.20 When the economy nose-dived, nervous lenders simply refused to renew. In 1932 and 1933 there were over a half million foreclosures. By mid-1933, over a thousand mortgages were being foreclosed every day. House prices plummeted by more than a fifth.21 The construction industry collapsed, revealing (as in all future recessions of the twentieth century) the extent to which the wider US economy relied on residential investment as an engine of growth.22 While the effect of the Depression was perhaps most devastating in the countryside, where land prices fell below half of their 1920 peak, the predicament of America’s cities was little better. Tenants, too, struggled to pay the rent when all they had coming in was the dole. In Detroit, for example, the automobile industry employed only half the number of workers it had in 1929, and at half the wages. The effects of the Depression are scarcely imaginable today: the abject misery of ubiquitous unemployment, the wretchedness of the soup kitchens, the desperate nomadic search for non-existent work. By 1932 the dispossessed of the Depression had had enough.

1932年3月7日,五千名被福特汽车公司解雇的失业工人游行穿过底特律市中心,要求政府救济。当这群手无寸铁的人群抵达位于迪尔伯恩的福特汽车公司河畔工厂4号门时,双方发生冲突。工厂大门突然打开,一群武装警察和保安冲出,向人群开枪。五名工人被杀。几天后,六万人在他们的葬礼上齐唱《国际歌》。共产党报纸指责福特公司创始人亨利·福特的儿子埃德塞尔·福特放任了这场屠杀:“你,一位艺术赞助人,一位圣公会的支柱,站在河畔工厂的桥上,眼睁睁地看着工人们被杀害。你却袖手旁观,没有阻止这一切。” 当时,局势似乎正在朝着革命的方向发展,究竟有什么办法可以化解这场危机呢?

On 7 March 1932 five thousand unemployed workers laid off by the Ford Motor Company marched through central Detroit to demand relief. As the unarmed crowd reached Gate 4 of the company’s River Rouge plant in Dearborn, scuffles broke out. Suddenly the factory gates opened and a group of armed police and security men rushed out and fired into the crowd. Five workers were killed. Days later, 60,000 people sang ‘The Internationale’ at their funeral. The Communist Party newspaper accused Edsel Ford, son of the firm’s founder Henry, of allowing a massacre: ‘You, a patron of the arts, a pillar of the Episcopal Church, stood on the bridge at the Rouge Plant and saw the workers killed. You did not lift a hand to stop it.’ Could anything be done to defuse what was beginning to seem like a revolutionary situation?

埃德塞尔·福特做出了一个非同寻常的和解姿态,他转而邀请墨西哥艺术家迭戈·里维拉,后者受底特律艺术学院邀请,绘制一幅壁画,以示友好。底特律的经济是一个合作之地,而非阶级冲突之地。这幅作品的创作地点选在了研究所气势恢宏的花园庭院,里维拉对这片空间情有独钟,以至于他提出要绘制的不是最初提议的两块画板,而是全部二十七块。福特对里维拉的初步草图印象深刻,同意资助整个项目,费用约为25,000美元。工程于1932年5月开工,就在里弗鲁日工厂冲突发生两个月后,里维拉于1933年3月完成了作品。福特很清楚,里维拉是一名共产主义者(尽管他是一位非正统的托洛茨基主义者,曾被墨西哥共产党开除)。的理想是建立一个没有私有财产、生产资料公有的社会。在里维拉看来,福特的里弗鲁日工厂恰恰相反:这是一个资本主义社会,工人们辛勤劳作,而坐享其成的地主们却袖手旁观。里维拉还试图探讨底特律种族分裂这一显著特征,并将炼钢所需的元素拟人化。正如他自己解释这一寓言时所说:

In a remarkable gesture of conciliation, Edsel Ford turned to the Mexican artist Diego Rivera, who had been invited by the Detroit Institute of Arts to paint a mural that would show Detroit’s economy as a place of cooperation, not class conflict. The site chosen for the work was the Institute’s imposing Garden Court, a space which so appealed to Rivera that he proposed to paint not just two of its panels, as had originally been suggested, but all twenty-seven. Ford, impressed by Rivera’s preliminary sketches, agreed to fund the entire scheme, at a cost of around $25,000. Work began in May 1932, just two months after the clashes at the River Rouge plant, and by March 1933 Rivera had finished. As Ford well knew, Rivera was a Communist (though an unorthodox Trotskyite who had been expelled from the Mexican Party).23 His ideal was of a society in which there would be no private property; in which the means of production would be commonly owned. In Rivera’s eyes, Ford’s River Rouge plant was the very opposite: a capitalist society where the workers worked and the property owners, who reaped the rewards from their efforts, just stood and watched. Rivera also sought to explore the racial divisions that were such a striking feature of Detroit, anthropomorphizing the elements necessary to make steel. As he himself explained the allegory:

黄种人象征着沙子,因为他们数量最多。红种人,这个国家最早的居民,就像铁矿石,是炼钢的首要原料。黑种人如同煤炭,因为他们拥有与生俱来的审美情趣,在古老的雕塑、独特的节奏和音乐中,蕴藏着真挚的情感和美感。因此,他们的审美情趣如同火焰,他们的劳动赋予了钢铁如同煤炭中的碳一样的硬度。白种人如同石灰,不仅因为他们是白色的,更因为石灰是炼钢过程中的组织剂。它将其他元素结合在一起,因此,白种人被视为世界的伟大组织者。

The yellow race represents the sand, because it is most numerous. And the red race, the first in this country, is like the iron ore, the first thing necessary for the steel. The black race is like coal, because it has a great native aesthetic sense, a real flame of feeling and beauty in its ancient sculpture, its native rhythm and music. So its aesthetic sense is like the fire, and its labor furnished the hardness which the carbon in the coal gives to steel. The white race is like the lime, not only because it is white, but because lime is the organizing agent in the making of steel. It binds together the other elements and so you see the white race as the great organizer of the world.

1933年壁画揭幕时,城里的显贵们感到震惊。正如玛丽格罗夫学院院长乔治·H·德里博士所说:

When the murals were unveiled in 1933, the city’s dignitaries were appalled. In the words of Dr George H. Derry, president of Marygrove College:

1932年3月,底特律爆发饥饿游行

Hunger march in Detroit, March 1932

警方对饥饿游行者使用催泪瓦斯。

“粉碎福特-墨菲警察的恐怖行径”:五名示威者死亡后引发抗议

里维拉先生对他的资本家雇主埃德塞尔·福特先生上演了一场冷酷无情的骗局。里维拉受聘诠释底特律,却将一份共产主义宣言强加给了福特先生和博物馆。当你走进房间,首先映入眼帘的那幅关键画板,便暴露了贯穿整个作品的共产主义主题,而这主题也正是解释整个作品的唯一依据。当底特律的女性们意识到,她们的化身正是画板上那位面容坚毅、充满男性气质、不带性别特征的女性,她正满怀渴望地凝视着画板另一侧,向着右侧那位慵懒而充满感官刺激的亚洲女性寻求希望和帮助时,她们会感到荣幸吗?24

Police use tear gas against the hunger marchers

‘Smash Ford-Murphy Police Terror’: protest following the deaths of five demonstrators

Senor Rivera has perpetrated a heartless hoax on his capitalist employer, Edsel Ford. Rivera was engaged to interpret Detroit; he has foisted on Mr Ford and the museum a Communist manifesto. The key panel that first strikes the eye, when you enter the room, betrays the Communist motif that animates and alone explains the whole ensemble. Will the women of Detroit feel flattered when they realize that they are embodied in the female with the hard, masculine, unsexed face, ecstatically staring for hope and help across the panel to the languorous and grossly sensual Asiatic sister on the right?24

一位市议员认为,粉刷壁画对它们来说太好了,因为将来仍然可以去除。他希望里维拉的作品被彻底清除,认为这是“对底特律精神的亵渎”。里维拉的下一个委托——装饰纽约市的墙壁——也差不多遭遇了同样的命运。为纪念小约翰·D·洛克菲勒而建的洛克菲勒中心,其壁画的创作缘起于艺术家坚持要在壁画中加入列宁的肖像,以及“打倒帝国主义战争!”、“工人联合起来!”等共产主义口号,其中最令人震惊的是“免费发放货币!”。这些标语原本计划由示威者在华尔街游行时举着。对此感到震惊的洛克菲勒下令销毁了这幅壁画。

One city councillor argued that whitewash was too good for the murals, as it could still be removed in future. He wanted Rivera’s work to be completely stripped off as ‘a travesty on the spirit of Detroit’. That was more or less what happened to Rivera’s next commission – to decorate the walls of New York’s Rockefeller Center for John D. Rockefeller Jr. – after the artist insisted on including a portrait of Lenin as well as Communist slogans like ‘Down With Imperialistic Wars!’, ‘Workers Unite!’ and, most shocking of all, ‘Free Money!’ These were to be carried by demonstrators marching down Wall Street itself. A scandalized Rockefeller ordered the mural to be destroyed.

艺术的力量固然伟大。但显然,要弥合因大萧条而分裂的社会,需要比艺术更强大的力量。许多其他国家走向了极权主义的极端。但在美国,答案是“新政”。富兰克林·罗斯福的第一届政府时期,联邦政府涌现出大量新的机构和举措,旨在重振萎靡不振的美国经济。在“新政”催生的众多缩略语中,人们很容易忽略其最成功、影响最深远的组成部分——住房改革。罗斯福政府通过大幅增加美国人拥有住房的机会,开创了“财产所有制民主”的先河。事实证明,这正是对抗“红色革命”的完美良方。

The power of art is a wonderful thing. But clearly something more powerful than art was going to be needed to put together a society that had been split in two by the Depression. Many other countries swung to the extremes of totalitarianism. But in the United States the answer was the New Deal. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first administration saw a proliferation of new federal government agencies and initiatives intended to re-inject confidence into the prostrate US economy. In the flood of acronyms the New Deal produced, it is easy to miss the fact that its most successful and enduring component was the new deal it offered with respect to housing. By radically increasing the opportunity for Americans to own their own homes, the Roosevelt administration pioneered the idea of a property-owning democracy. It proved to be the perfect antidote to red revolution.

从某种程度上说,新政是政府试图在市场失灵时介入的举措。一些新政支持者赞成增加公共住房的供应,这种模式在大多数欧洲国家都得到了应用。事实上,公共工程署将近15%的预算用于建造廉价住房和清理贫民窟。但更重要的是,罗斯福政府为迅速萎缩的抵押贷款市场提供了一条生命线。一家新的住房所有者贷款公司介入,为抵押贷款提供期限更长的再融资,最长可达15年。联邦住房贷款银行委员会早在1932年就已成立,旨在鼓励和监管被称为储蓄贷款机构(或储蓄互助会)的地方抵押贷款机构,这些机构类似于英国的房屋互助协会,吸收存款并向购房者放贷。为了安抚那些因前三年银行倒闭而遭受打击的储户,罗斯福推出了联邦存款保险。其理念是,将钱存入银行……抵押贷款甚至比房屋更安全,因为如果借款人违约,政府会直接补偿储户。25理论上,储蓄贷款机构再也不会出现像乔治·贝利(吉米·斯图尔特饰演)在弗兰克·卡普拉1946年的经典电影《生活多美好》中竭力维持的家族企业贝利建筑贷款公司挤兑那样的挤兑了。“你知道吗,乔治,”他父亲告诉他,“我觉得我们正在以微薄之力做一件重要的事情。满足了一种基本的需求。每个人都渴望拥有自己的屋顶、墙壁和壁炉,而我们正在我们这间破旧的小办公室里帮助他们实现这些愿望。”乔治明白了父亲的意思,在老贝利去世后,他热情地向邪恶的房东波特解释了这一点:

At one level, the New Deal was an attempt by government to step in where the market had failed. Some New Dealers favoured the increased provision of public housing, the model that was adopted in most European countries. Indeed, the Public Works Administration spent nearly 15 per cent of its budget on low-cost homes and slum clearance. But of far more importance was the Roosevelt administration’s lifeline to the rapidly sinking mortgage market. A new Home Owners’ Loan Corporation stepped in to refinance mortgages on longer terms, up to fifteen years. A Federal Home Loan Bank Board had already been set up in 1932 to encourage and oversee local mortgage lenders known as Savings and Loans (or thrifts), mutual associations like British building societies, which took in deposits and lent to home buyers. To reassure depositors, who had been traumatized by the bank failures of the previous three years, Roosevelt introduced federal deposit insurance. The idea was that putting money in mortgages would be even safer than houses, because if borrowers defaulted, the government would simply compensate the savers.25 In theory, there could never be another run on a Savings and Loan like the run on the family-owned Bailey Building & Loan which George Bailey (played by Jimmy Stewart) struggled to keep afloat in Frank Capra’s classic 1946 movie It’s a Wonderful Life. ‘You know, George,’ his father tells him, ‘I feel that in a small way we are doing something important. Satisfying a fundamental urge. It’s deep in the race for a man to want his own roof and walls and fireplace, and we’re helping him get those things in our shabby little office.’ George gets the message, as he passionately explains to the villainous slum landlord Potter after Bailey senior’s death:

我父亲从来没想过自己……但他确实帮助一些人摆脱了你们的贫民窟,波特先生。这有什么错?难道这不会让他们成为更好的公民吗?难道这不会让他们成为更好的顾客吗?……您说……他们必须等到攒够钱才能考虑买一套像样的房子。等!等什么?等到他们的孩子长大离开他们吗?等到他们老得不行,身体垮了……您知道一个工人要花多久才能攒够五千美元吗?记住,波特先生,您说的这些乌合之众……他们才是这个社区里大部分的劳动者、纳税人、居民和死者。那么,让他们在几间像样的房间和一个浴室里工作、纳税、生活和死去,难道就过分吗?

[My father] never once thought of himself . . . But he did help a few people get out of your slums, Mr Potter. And what’s wrong with that? Doesn’t it make them better citizens? Doesn’t it make them better customers? . . . You said . . . they had to wait and save their money before they even ought to think of a decent home. Wait! Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they’re so old and broken-down that they . . . Do you know how long it takes a working man to save five thousand dollars? Just remember this, Mr Potter, that this rabble you’re talking about . . . they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?

这种对房屋所有权价值的彻底肯定是前所未有的。但真正改变美国购房者命运的是联邦住房管理局(FHA)。FHA通过为抵押贷款机构提供联邦政府担保的保险,鼓励发放金额较大(最高可达购房价格的80%)、期限较长(20年)、完全摊销且利率较低的贷款。这不仅重振了抵押贷款市场,更彻底重塑了它。通过规范长期抵押贷款并建立全国性的官方检查和估值体系,联邦住房管理局(FHA)为全国二级市场奠定了基础。这个市场于1938年正式启动,当时新成立的联邦国民抵押贷款协会(简称房利美)获准发行债券,并将所得款项用于从地方储蓄贷款机构购买抵押贷款。这些机构当时受到监管限制,不仅在地域上(贷款对象不得距离其办公地点超过50英里),而且在向储户提供的利率方面(即所谓的Q条例,该条例规定了较低的利率上限)也受到限制。由于这些改革降低了抵押贷款的平均月供,FHA使更多美国人实现了拥有住房的梦想。事实上,毫不夸张地说,现代美国,以及其千篇一律的郊区,正是在这里诞生的。

This radical affirmation of the virtue of home ownership was new. But it was the Federal Housing Administration that really made the difference for American homebuyers. By providing federally backed insurance for mortgage lenders, the FHA sought to encourage large (up to 80 per cent of the purchase price), long (twenty-year), fully amortized and low-interest loans. This did more than merely revive the mortgage market; it reinvented it. By standardizing the long-term mortgage and creating a national system of official inspection and valuation, the FHA laid the foundation for a national secondary market. This market came to life in 1938, when a new Federal National Mortgage Association – nicknamed Fannie Mae – was authorized to issue bonds and use the proceeds to buy mortgages from the local Savings and Loans, which were now restricted by regulation both in terms of geography (they could not lend to borrowers more than fifty miles from their offices) and in terms of the rates they could offer depositors (the so-called Regulation Q, which imposed a low ceiling). Because these changes tended to reduce the average monthly payment on a mortgage, the FHA made home ownership viable for many more Americans than ever before. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the modern United States, with its seductively samey suburbs, was born here.

《生活多美好》:弗兰克·卡普拉的这部影片颂扬了当地“节俭银行”或储蓄贷款机构的优点,吉米·斯图尔特饰演了可爱的抵押贷款人。

It’s a Wonderful Life: Frank Capra’s celebration of the virtues of the local ‘thrift’ or Savings and Loan, with Jimmy Stewart as the lovable mortgage lender

因此,从20世纪30年代开始,美国政府……实际上,这相当于为抵押贷款市场提供了担保,鼓励贷款人和借款人达成交易。正是这一点导致二战后房产拥有量和抵押贷款债务飙升,到1960年,房屋拥有率从40%上升到60%。但有一个问题:并非美国社会中的每个人都有资格拥有房产。

From the 1930s onwards, then, the US government was effectively underwriting the mortgage market, encouraging lenders and borrowers to get together. That was what caused property ownership – and mortgage debt – to soar after the Second World War, driving up the home ownership rate from 40 per cent to 60 per cent by 1960. There was only one catch. Not everyone in American society was entitled to join the property-owning party.


1941年,一位房地产开发商在底特律的八英里区(8 Mile District)上建起了一堵六英尺高的围墙。他必须建这堵墙才能获得联邦住房管理局(Federal Housing Administration)的补贴贷款。这些贷款只能用于在围墙一侧——居民以白人为主的一侧——进行建设。在以黑人为主的城区,联邦贷款则被禁止发放,因为非裔美国人被认为信用不良。 26这是一种将整个城市划分开来的制度的一部分,理论上是按信用评级划分,实际上则是按肤色划分。换句话说,种族隔离并非偶然,而是政府政策的直接后果。联邦住房贷款银行委员会(Federal Home Loan Bank Board)的地图显示,底特律以黑人为主的地区——下东区(Lower East Side)以及西区(West Side)和八英里区的一些所谓“聚居区”——被标记为“D”并用红色标出。标记为“A”、“B”或“C”的地区则主要是白人居住区。这种区分解释了为什么给整个地区贴上负面信用标签的做法被称为“红线区”(redlining)。27因此,当D地区的人们想要申请抵押贷款时,他们支付的利率远高于A至C地区的人们。在20世纪50年代,五分之一的黑人抵押贷款借款人支付的利率为8%或更高,而几乎没有白人支付的利率超过7%。28就是民权运动中隐藏的经济层面。

In 1941 a real estate developer built a six-foot high wall right across Detroit’s 8 Mile district. He had to build it to qualify for subsidized loans from the Federal Housing Administration. The loans were to be given out for construction only on the side of the wall where the residents were mainly white. In the predominantly black part of town, there was to be no federal lending, because African-Americans were regarded as uncreditworthy.26 It was part of a system that divided the whole city, in theory by credit-rating, in practice by colour. Segregation, in other words, was not accidental, but a direct consequence of government policy. Federal Home Loan Bank Board maps showed the predominantly black areas of Detroit – the Lower East Side and some so-called colonies on the West Side and 8 Mile – marked with a D and coloured red. The areas marked A, B or C were mainly white. The distinction explains why the practice of giving whole areas a negative credit-rating came to be known as red-lining.27 As a result, when people in D areas wanted to take out mortgages, they paid significantly higher interest rates than the people from areas A to C. In the 1950s, one in five black mortgage-borrowers paid 8 per cent or more, whereas virtually no whites paid more than 7 per cent.28 This was the hidden financial dimension of the Civil Rights struggle.

底特律曾是许多成功黑人企业家的故乡,例如摩城唱片公司的创始人贝瑞·戈迪。巧合的是,摩城唱片公司的第一首热门歌曲正是巴雷特·斯特朗演唱的《金钱,这就是我想要的》(Money, That's What I Want),发行于1960年。其他摩城明星,例如马文·盖伊,也仍然居住在这座城市。然而,在整个20世纪60年代,人们仍然普遍存在着一种偏见,认为黑人居住区信用风险很高。对这种经济歧视的愤怒是1967年7月23日底特律第十二街爆发骚乱的根源。在警方突袭一家“盲猪”(无证酒吧)后,五天的混乱中,43人丧生,467人受伤,超过7200人被捕,近3000栋建筑遭到洗劫或焚毁——这有力地象征着黑人对仍然将他们视为二等公民的财产所有制民主制度的反抗。29即使在今天,你仍然可以看到骚乱过后留下的空地。最终动用正规军、坦克和机枪才平息了这场被官方认定为暴动的事件。

Detroit was home to successful black entrepreneurs like Berry Gordy, the founder of the Motown record label, which appropriately enough had its very first hit in 1960 with Barrett Strong’s ‘Money, That’s What I Want’. Other Motown stars like Marvin Gaye still lived in the city. Yet throughout the 1960s the prejudice persisted that black neighbourhoods were a bad credit risk. Anger at such economic discrimination lay behind the riots that broke out in Detroit’s 12th Street on 23 July 1967. In five days of mayhem after a police raid on a ‘blind pig’ (an unlicensed bar), forty-three people were killed, 467 injured, over 7,200 arrested and nearly 3,000 buildings looted or burned – a potent symbol of black rejection of a property-owning democracy that still treated them as second-class citizens.29 Even today, you can still see the empty lots that the riots left in their wake. It took regular army troops with tanks and machine-guns to quell what was officially recognized as an insurrection.

如同20世纪30年代一样,暴力挑战引发了政治回应。在20世纪60年代民权法案颁布之后,政府采取了新的措施来扩大住房所有权的覆盖范围。1968年,房利美被拆分为两部分:政府国民抵押贷款协会(吉利美),专门服务于退伍军人等贫困借款人;以及重新注册的房利美,如今已成为一家私营的政府支持企业(GSE),获准购买传统抵押贷款以及政府担保抵押贷款。两年后,为了在二级市场引入竞争,联邦住房贷款抵押公司(房地美)成立。此举再次扩大了抵押贷款的二级市场,并且至少在理论上降低了抵押贷款利率。毋庸置疑,基于种族歧视的“红线区”政策并没有在一夜之间消失;但它已成为一项联邦罪行。30事实上,随着1977年《社区再投资法案》的通过,美国银行面临着法律压力,必须向贫困的少数族裔社区放贷。如今,美国住房市场由房利美、吉利美和房地美这三家机构——听起来像是金融版的“妈妈爸爸乐队”——提供担保,这无疑为拥有房产的民主社会创造了有利的政治环境。那些经营储蓄贷款机构的人可以奉行“3-6-3”的优渥法则:存款利率3%,贷款利率6%,然后每天下午3点前就能去打高尔夫球了。

As in the 1930s, the challenge of violence brought a political response. In the wake of the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s, new steps were taken to broaden access to home ownership. In 1968 Fannie Mae was split in two: the Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae), which was to cater to poor borrowers like military veterans, and a rechartered Fannie Mae, now a privately owned government sponsored enterprise (GSE), which was permitted to buy conventional as well as government-guaranteed mortgages. Two years later, to provide some competition in the secondary market, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) was set up. The effect was once again to broaden the secondary market for mortgages, and in theory at least to lower mortgage rates. Red-lining on the basis of racial discrimination did not cease overnight, needless to say; but it became a federal offence.30 Indeed, with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, American banks came under statutory pressure to lend to poorer minority communities. With the US housing market now underwritten by what sounded like a financial version of the Mamas and the Papas – Fannie, Ginnie and Freddie – the political winds were set fair for the property-owning democracy. Those who ran Savings and Loans could live by the comfortable 3-6-3 rule: pay 3 per cent on deposits, lend money at 6 per cent and be on the golf course by 3 o’clock every afternoon.


住房拥有率的增长速度跟上大西洋彼岸人口比例的增长速度较慢。战后英国,保守党和工党政客普遍认为,国家应该为工人阶级提供住房,或者至少提供补贴。事实上,哈罗德·麦克米伦曾力图在住房建设方面超越工党,设定了每年新建30万套(后来提高到40万套)的目标。1959年至1964年间,英国约三分之一的新建住房由地方议会建造,在随后六年工党执政期间,这一比例上升至一半。如今,英国大多数城市充斥着丑陋且社会功能失调的高层住宅楼和“公屋区”,而这两个政党都难辞其咎。左右两派之间唯一的真正区别在于:保守党倾向于放松对私人租赁市场的管制,希望以此鼓励私人房东;而工党则决心恢复租金管制,并根除以彼得·拉赫曼为代表的“拉赫曼主义”(房东的剥削行为)。拉赫曼曾使用恐吓手段驱逐租金管制房产的现有租户,并用必须支付市场租金的西印度移民取而代之。 31直到1971年,英国只有不到一半的房屋是业主自住的。

The rate of home ownership caught up more slowly with the representation of the people on the other side of the Atlantic. In post-war Britain the conventional wisdom among Conservative as well as Labour politicians was that the state should provide or at least subsidize housing for the working classes. Indeed, Harold Macmillan sought to out-build Labour with a target of 300,000 (later 400,000) new houses a year. Between 1959 and 1964, roughly a third of new houses in Britain were built by local councils, rising to half in the subsequent six years of Labour rule. The ugly and socially dysfunctional tower blocks and housing ‘estates’ that today blight most of Britain’s cities can be blamed on both parties. The only real difference between Right and Left was the readiness of the Conservatives to deregulate the private rental market, in the hope of encouraging private landlords, and the equal and opposite resolve of Labour to reimpose rent controls and stamp out ‘Rachmanism’ (exploitative behaviour by landlords), exemplified by Peter Rachman, who used intimidation to evict the sitting tenants of rent-controlled properties, replacing them with West Indian immigrants who had to pay market rents.31 As late as 1971, fewer than half of British homes were owner-occupied.

在美国,公共住房的重要性远不及其他国家,自1913年联邦所得税制度创立以来,抵押贷款利息支出一直可以抵税。 32正如罗纳德·里根在这项税收优惠的合理性受到质疑时所说,抵押贷款利息减免是“美国梦的一部分”。*在英国,这项政策的作用要小得多,直到1983年,由玛格丽特·撒切尔领导的更为激进的保守党政府推出了“源头抵押贷款利息减免”(MIRAS)政策,为符合条件的抵押贷款的前3万英镑提供税收减免。当财政大臣奈杰尔·劳森试图限制这项减免(以防止多个借款人同时享受同一房产的优惠)时,他很快就“碰壁了,因为玛格丽特·撒切尔对保留每一项抵押贷款利息减免政策都充满热情”。 33 MIRAS并非撒切尔鼓励住房拥有的唯一途径。她以极低的价格将公屋出售给一百五十万渴望拥有住房的工薪阶层家庭,确保了越来越多的英国男女拥有自己的住房。结果是,自住房屋的比例从1981年的54%跃升至十年后的67%。自住房屋的数量也从1980年的略高于1100万套飙升至如今的超过1700万套。 34

In the United States, where public housing was never so important, mortgage interest payments were always tax deductible, from the inception of the federal income tax in 1913.32 As Ronald Reagan said when the rationality of this tax break was challenged, mortgage interest relief was ‘part of the American dream’.* It played a much smaller role in Britain until 1983, when a more radically Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher introduced Mortgage Interest Relief At Source (MIRAS) for the first £30,000 of a qualifying mortgage. When her Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson sought to limit the deduction (so that multiple borrowers could not all take advantage of it for a single property), he soon ‘ran up against the brick wall of Margaret [Thatcher]’s passionate devotion to the preservation of every last ounce of mortgage interest relief’.33 Nor was MIRAS the only way that Thatcher sought to encourage home ownership. By selling off council houses at bargain-basement prices to a million and a half aspirant working-class families, she ensured that more and more British men and women had a home of their own. The result was a leap in the share of owner-occupiers from 54 per cent in 1981 to 67 per cent ten years later. The stock of owner-occupied properties has soared from just over 11 million in 1980 to more than 17 million today.34

直到20世纪80年代,政府鼓励借贷购房的政策对普通家庭来说确实很有吸引力。事实上,20世纪60年代末和70年代通货膨胀率高于利率的趋势,使得债务人实际上享受到了“免费午餐”,因为他们的债务和利息支出都在下降。尽管70年代中期美国购房者预计到1980年通货膨胀率至少会达到12%,但抵押贷款机构却提供利率在9%或以下的30年期固定利率贷款。35一段时间内,贷款机构实际上是在付钱给借款人。与此同时,1963年至1979年间,房价大约翻了三倍,而消费价格仅上涨了2.5倍。然而,这其中却暗藏玄机。那些曾信奉“财产民主”的政府,最终也相信物价稳定,或者至少是降低通货膨胀。而实现这一目标意味着更高的利率。其意想不到的后果是房地产市场历史上最壮观的繁荣与萧条之一。

Up until the 1980s, government incentives to borrow and buy a house made a good deal of sense for ordinary households. Indeed, the tendency for inflation rates to rise above interest rates in the late 1960s and 1970s gave debtors a free lunch as the real value of their debts and interest payments declined. While American home purchasers in the mid-seventies anticipated an inflation rate of at least 12 per cent by 1980, mortgage lenders were offering thirty-year fixed-rate loans at 9 per cent or less.35 For a time, lenders were effectively paying people to borrow their money. Meanwhile, property prices roughly trebled between 1963 and 1979, while consumer prices rose by a factor of just 2.5. But there was a sting in the tail. The same governments that avowed their faith in the ‘property-owning democracy’ also turned out to believe in price stability, or at least lower inflation. Achieving that meant higher interest rates. The unintended consequence was one of the most spectacular booms and busts in the history of the property market.

从储贷危机到次贷危机

From S&L to Subprime

从德克萨斯州达拉斯沿30号州际公路驱车而上,你一定会注意到绵延数英里的未完工房屋和公寓。它们的存在是美国历史上最大的金融丑闻之一——一场彻底颠覆“房产是安全投资”理念的骗局——留下的最后痕迹之一。接下来要讲的与其说是房地产的故事,不如说是超现实主义的故事。

Take a drive along Interstate 30 from Dallas, Texas, and you cannot fail to notice mile after mile of half-built houses and condominiums. Their existence is one of the last visible traces of one of the biggest financial scandals in American history, a scam that made a mockery of the whole idea of property as a safe investment. What follows is a story not so much about real estate as about surreal estate.

储蓄贷款协会(S&L协会)——美国版英国的房屋互助协会——是美国财产所有制民主的基石。这些协会由储户共同所有,同时受到政府监管框架的保护和约束。36政府为高达4万美元的存款提供保险,保费仅为存款总额的十二分之一。另一方面,它们只能向总部50英里范围内的购房者放贷。自1966年起,根据Q条例,它们的存款利率上限为5.5%,比银行允许支付的利率高出0.25个百分点。20世纪70年代末,这个原本沉寂的行业先是遭受了两位数通货膨胀的冲击——1979年通货膨胀率达到13.3%——随后又遭受了利率的急剧上升,因为新上任的美联储主席保罗·沃尔克试图通过放缓货币增长来打破工资-物价螺旋式上升的局面。这双重打击是致命的。由于通货膨胀,储蓄贷款机构在长期固定利率抵押贷款上亏损,同时存款大量流向利率更高的货币市场基金。卡特和里根两届政府在华盛顿的应对措施是试图通过减税和放松管制来挽救整个行业,*他们相信市场力量可以解决问题。37新法案通过后,里根总统宣称:“总而言之,我认为我们中了头彩。” 38有些人确实如此认为。

Savings and Loan (S&L) associations – the American version of Britain’s building societies – were the foundation on which America’s property-owning democracy had come to rest. Owned mutually by their depositors, they were simultaneously protected and constrained by a framework of government regulation.36 Deposits of up to $40,000 were insured by government for a premium of just one twelfth of one per cent of total deposits. On the other hand, they could lend only to home buyers within fifty miles of their main office. And from 1966, under Regulation Q, there was a ceiling of 5.5 per cent on their deposit rates, a quarter of a per cent more than banks were allowed to pay. In the late 1970s, this sleepy sector was hit first by double-digit inflation – which reached 13.3 per cent in 1979 – and then by sharply rising interest rates as the newly appointed Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker sought to break the wage-price spiral by slowing monetary growth. This double punch was lethal. The S&Ls were simultaneously losing money on long-term fixed-rate mortgages, because of inflation, and haemorrhaging deposits to higher-interest money market funds. The response in Washington from both the Carter and Reagan administrations was to try to salvage the entire sector with tax breaks and deregulation,* in the belief that market forces could solve the problem.37 When the new legislation was passed, President Reagan declared: ‘All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.’38 Some people certainly did.

一方面,储蓄贷款机构现在可以投资任何他们喜欢的资产,而不仅仅局限于长期抵押贷款。商业地产、股票、垃圾债券:任何投资都允许。他们甚至可以发行信用卡。另一方面,他们现在可以向储户支付任何他们想要的利率。然而,他们所有的存款实际上仍然受到保险​​保障,最高保障额度从4万美元提高到10万美元。而且,如果普通存款不足以支付所有费用,储蓄贷款机构还可以通过经纪方式筹集资金。中间商将存款打包出售,发行面值高达10万美元的“巨额”存款凭证。 39突然间,储蓄贷款机构的经营者们似乎没有什么可失去的了——这正是经济学家所说的道德风险的典型案例。40接下来发生的事情完美地诠释了加州储蓄贷款部专员威廉·克劳福德最初提出的那条伟大的金融准则:“抢银行的最佳方法就是拥有一家银行。” 41 一些储蓄贷款机构将储户的钱押注在极其可疑的项目上。许多机构干脆直接窃取了存款,仿佛放松管制意味着法律不再适用于他们。在德克萨斯州,这种做法尤为猖獗。

On the one hand, S&Ls could now invest in whatever they liked, not just long-term mortgages. Commercial property, stocks, junk bonds: anything was allowed. They could even issue credit cards. On the other, they could now pay whatever interest rate they liked to depositors. Yet all their deposits were still effectively insured, with the maximum covered amount raised from $40,000 to $100,000. And, if ordinary deposits did not suffice, the S&Ls could raise money in the form of brokered deposits from middlemen, who packaged and sold ‘jumbo’ $100,000 certificates of deposit.39 Suddenly the people running Savings and Loans had nothing to lose – a clear case of what economists call moral hazard.40 What happened next perfectly illustrated the great financial precept first enunciated by William Crawford, the Commissioner of the California Department of Savings and Loans: ‘The best way to rob a bank is to own one.’41 Some S&Ls bet their depositors’ money on highly dubious projects. Many simply stole it, as if deregulation meant that the law no longer applied to them. Nowhere were these practices more rife than in Texas.

当这些达拉斯的房地产大亨们不在他们位于南福克风格的牧场里寻欢作乐时,他们喜欢在Wise Circle Grill餐厅洽谈生意。42周日早午餐的常客包括唐·迪克森,他的弗农储蓄贷款公司被监管机构戏称为“害虫”;43 Sunbelt(“枪带”)的埃德·麦克伯尼;以及州立储蓄贷款公司的所有者兼首席执行官泰瑞尔·巴克,他喜欢对房地产开发商说:“你提供地皮,我提供资金。” 44马里奥·伦达就是这样一位既提供地皮又提供资金的人,他是纽约卡车司机工会的经纪人,据称他利用储蓄贷款机构洗钱。当他需要更多现金时,他甚至在《纽约时报》上刊登广告:

When they weren’t whooping it up at their Southfork-style ranches, the Dallas property cowboys liked to do their deals at the Wise Circle Grill.42 Regulars for Sunday brunch included Don Dixon, whose Vernon S&L was nicknamed Vermin by regulators,43 Ed McBirney of Sunbelt (‘Gunbelt’) and Tyrell Barker, owner and CEO of State Savings and Loan, who liked to tell property developers: ‘You bring the dirt, I bring the money.’44 One individual who brought both dirt and money was Mario Renda, a New York broker for the Teamsters Union who allegedly used Savings and Loans to launder Mafia funds. When he needed more cash, he even advertised in the New York Times:

租房资金:通过在当地银行存入押金来消除借贷障碍一种全新的便捷融资方式。45

MONEY FOR RENT: BORROWING OBSTACLES NEUTRALIZED BY HAVING US DEPOSIT FUNDS WITH YOUR LOCAL BANK: NEW TURNSTILE APPROACH TO FINANCING.45

如果你想打造一个房地产帝国,为什么不直接说出来呢?对于达拉斯的一群开发商来说,帝国储蓄贷款公司(Empire Savings and Loan)提供了一个绝佳的机会,让他们能够凭空——或者更确切地说,凭德克萨斯州平坦的土地——发家致富。这一切看似荒诞,却始于帝国储蓄贷款公司董事长小斯宾塞·H·布莱恩(Spencer H. Blain Jr.)与加兰市市长詹姆斯·托勒(James Toler)以及一位名叫丹尼·福克纳(Danny Faulkner)的、作风张扬的高中辍学生兼房地产开发商联手。福克纳的专长在于挥霍他人的钱财。这些钱财以经纪存款的形式存在,帝国储蓄贷款公司为此支付了诱人的高额利息。利率。福克纳角位于达拉斯以东20英里处,靠近荒凉的人工湖雷·哈伯德湖,是福克纳地产帝国的第一个据点,这个帝国后来囊括了福克纳环岛、福克纳溪、福克纳橡树,甚至福克纳喷泉。福克纳最擅长的伎俩是“倒卖”,他会以极低的价格买下一块地,然后以高得离谱的价格卖给投资者,而这些投资者则从帝国储蓄贷款公司借钱。福克纳曾以300万美元的价格买下一块地,几天后就以4700万美元的价格卖掉了。丹尼·福克纳自称不识字,但他绝对不是不懂算术。

If you want to build a property empire, why not just say so? For one group of Dallas developers, it was Empire Savings and Loan that offered the perfect opportunity to make a fortune out of thin air – or, rather, flat Texan earth. The surrealism began when Empire chairman Spencer H. Blain Jr. teamed up with James Toler, the mayor of the town of Garland, and a flamboyant high school dropout turned property developer named Danny Faulkner, whose speciality was extravagant generosity with other people’s money. The money in question came in the form of brokered deposits, on which Empire paid alluringly high interest rates. Faulkner’s Point, located near the bleak artificial lake known as Lake Ray Hubbard, twenty miles east of Dallas, was the first outpost of a property empire that would later encompass Faulkner Circle, Faulkner Creek, Faulkner Oaks – even Faulkner Fountains. Faulkner’s favourite trick was ‘the flip’, whereby he would acquire a plot of land for peanuts, and then sell it on at vastly inflated prices to investors, who borrowed the money from Empire Savings and Loan. One parcel of land was bought by Faulkner for $3 million and sold just a few days later for $47 million. Danny Faulkner claimed to be illiterate. He was certainly not innumerate.

到1984年,达拉斯地区的开发已经失控。沿着30号州际公路绵延数英里,新建的公寓楼拔地而起。城市的天际线被当地人戏称为“透明”的办公楼所取代——之所以说是“透明”,是因为它们大多空置。这些建筑拔地而起,资金来源是联邦政府担保的存款,而这些存款实际上都直接进了开发商的口袋。至少在账面上,帝国地产的资产在短短两年多的时间里就从1200万美元增长到了2.57亿美元。到1984年1月,其资产更是达到了3.09亿美元。许多投资者甚至连近距离查看自己房产的机会都没有;福克纳只需驾驶直升机飞过,根本不会降落。每个人都在赚钱:福克纳拥有价值400万美元的里尔喷气机,托勒拥有白色劳斯莱斯,布莱恩拥有价值4000美元的劳力士——更不用说那些房产评估师、体育明星投资者和地方监管机构了。男人们戴着金手镯,女人们穿着皮草大衣。46其中一位参与者承认:“这简直就是一台印钞机,一切都围绕着丹尼的需求运转。如果丹尼需要一架新飞机,我们就帮他做一笔土地交易。如果丹尼想买个新农场,我们就再做一笔。丹尼一手包办了一切,连最细微的细节都安排得井井有条。” 47节俭和偷窃之间的界限本应很宽。福克纳公司却把这条界限模糊到了一线之隔。

By 1984 development in the Dallas area was out of control. There were new condos under construction for miles along Interstate 30. The city’s skyline had been transformed with what locals referred to as ‘see-through’ office buildings – see-through because they were still mostly empty. The building just kept on going, paid for by federally insured deposits that were effectively going straight into the developers’ pockets. On paper at least, the assets of Empire had grown from $12 million to $257 million in just over two years. By January 1984 they stood at $309 million. Many investors never even got a chance to view their properties close up; Faulkner would simply fly them over in his helicopter without landing. Everyone was making money: Faulkner with his $4 million Learjet, Toler with his white Rolls-Royce, Blain with his $4,000 Rolex – not to mention the property appraisers, the sports star investors and the local regulators. There were gold bracelets for the men and fur coats for the wives.46 ‘It was’, one of those involved acknowledged, ‘like a money machine, and all of it was geared to what Danny needed. If Danny needed a new jet, we did a land deal. If Danny wanted to buy a new farm, we did another. Danny ran the whole thing for Danny, right down to the last detail.’47 The line between thrift and theft is supposed to be a wide one. Faulkner & Co. reduced it to a hair’s breadth.

房地产“翻新”大师:丹尼·福克纳和他的直升机

The master of the real estate ‘flip’: Danny Faulkner with his helicopter

问题在于,30号州际公路沿线公寓的需求量永远无法跟上福克纳、布莱恩及其同伙建造的大量公寓供应量。到了20世纪80年代初,房地产经纪人开玩笑说,性病和公寓的区别在于,性病是可以治好的。此外,大多数储蓄贷款机构的资产负债错配问题如今已变得十分严重,越来越多的长期贷款(发放给内部人员)是用从外部借来的短期资金发放的。当监管机构在1984年姗姗来迟地试图采取行动时,这些现实已不容忽视。3月14日,时任联邦住房贷款银行委员会主席的埃德温·J·格雷下令关闭帝国储蓄贷款公司。负责为储蓄贷款机构存款提供保险的联邦储蓄贷款保险公司为此损失了3亿美元。但这仅仅是个开始。随着其他公司也受到审查,立法者们犹豫不决,尤其是那些曾接受过储蓄贷款机构慷慨竞选捐款的议员。*然而,随着时间的推移,情况变得越来越糟。他们等待的时间越长,损失的资金就越多。到1986年,FSLIC自身破产的迹象已经非常明显。

The trouble was that the demand for condos on Interstate 30 could never possibly have kept pace with the vast supply being built by Faulkner, Blain and their cronies. By the early 1980s estate agents were joking that the difference between venereal disease and condominiums was that you could get rid of VD. Moreover, the mismatch between the assets and liabilities of most Savings and Loans had now become disastrous, with ever more long-term loans being made (to insiders) using money borrowed short-term (from outsiders). When the regulators belatedly sought to act in 1984, these realities could no longer be ignored. On 14 March Edwin J. Gray, then chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, ordered the closure of Empire. The cost to the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, which was supposed to insure S&L deposits, was $300 million. But this was just the beginning. As other firms came under scrutiny, legislators hesitated, particularly those who had received generous campaign contributions from S&Ls.* Yet the longer they waited, the more money got burned. By 1986 it was clear that the FSLIC was itself insolvent.

1991年,经过两次审判(第一次审判因陪审团意见不一而流审),福克纳、布莱恩和托勒被判犯有民事敲诈勒索罪,并通过欺诈性土地交易从帝国银行和其他储贷机构掠夺了1.65亿美元。他们每人被判处20年监禁,并被勒令支付数百万美元的赔偿金。一位调查员称帝国银行是他见过的“最鲁莽、最欺诈的土地投资计划之一”。 48储贷危机整体而言也大致如此;埃德温·格雷称之为“美国银行业历史上最普遍、最鲁莽、最欺诈的时期”。总共有近500家储贷机构倒闭或被迫关闭;大约相同数量的机构在国会设立的清算信托公司(Resolution Trust Corporation)的主持下被合并清算,以清理这场混乱。据官方估计,近一半的破产机构都存在“内部人员的欺诈和潜在的犯罪行为”。截至1991年5月,已有764人被控犯有各种罪行,其中550人被定罪,326人被判入狱。罚款总额达800万美元。 49 1986年至1995年间储贷危机的最终成本为1530亿美元(约占GDP的3%),其中纳税人承担了1240亿美元,使其成为自大萧条以来最昂贵的金融危机。 50 这场灾难的遗迹散落在德克萨斯州各地:破败的住宅区,这些住宅区是用盗窃所得的资金廉价建造的,随后被推土机夷为平地或烧毁。24年后,I-30走廊的大部分地区仍然是德克萨斯州的一片荒地。

In 1991, after two trials (the first of which ended with a hung jury), Faulkner, Blain and Toler were convicted of civil racketeering and looting $165 million from Empire and other S&Ls through fraudulent land deals. Each was sentenced to twenty years in jail and ordered to pay millions of dollars in restitution. One investigator called Empire ‘one of the most reckless and fraudulent land investment schemes’ he had ever seen.48 Much the same could be said for the Savings and Loans crisis as a whole; Edwin Gray called it ‘the most widespread, reckless and fraudulent era in this nation’s banking history’. In all, nearly five hundred S&Ls collapsed or were forced to close down; roughly the same number were merged out of existence under the auspices of the Resolution Trust Corporation set up by Congress to clear up the mess. According to one official estimate, nearly half of the insolvent institutions had seen ‘fraud and potentially criminal conduct by insiders’. By May 1991, 764 people had been charged with a variety of offences, of whom 550 were convicted and 326 sentenced to jail. Fines of $8 million were imposed.49 The final cost of the Savings and Loans crisis between 1986 and 1995 was $153 billion (around 3 per cent of GDP), of which taxpayers had to pay $124 billion, making it the most expensive financial crisis since the Depression.50 Strewn all over Texas are the archaeological remains of the debacle: derelict housing estates, built on the cheap with stolen money, and subsequently bulldozed or burned down. Twenty-four years later, much of the I-30 corridor is still just another Texan wasteland.


对美国纳税人来说,储贷危机是一次代价惨重的教训,让他们深刻认识到考虑不周的放松管制所带来的危险。但即便储贷机构濒临破产,它们仍然提供了……另一群截然不同的美国人则走上了通往巨额财富的捷径。对于纽约投资银行所罗门兄弟公司的债券交易员来说,新政抵押贷款体系的崩溃并非危机,而是一次绝佳的机会。这些自诩为“大佬”的所罗门人,虽然贪婪成性,言辞粗俗,却看到了利用20世纪80年代初剧烈波动的利率牟利的良机。当走投无路的储蓄贷款机构开始抛售抵押贷款以求维持偿付能力时,所罗门兄弟公司的首席抵押贷款交易员路易斯·拉涅利挺身而出。毋庸置疑,“路易”以极低的价格买下了这些抵押贷款。拉涅利身材魁梧,穿着廉价衬衫,操着一口布鲁克林式的俏皮话(他最初在所罗门兄弟公司的邮件收发室工作),他就是新华尔街的化身,与那些穿着布鲁克斯兄弟西装、戴着背带裤的考究的投资银行家截然相反。其理念在于革新抵押贷款模式,将成千上万笔抵押贷款打包在一起,作为新型且极具吸引力的证券的抵押品,这些证券可以作为传统政府债券和公司债券的替代品出售——简而言之,就是将抵押贷款转化为债券。一旦打包,抵押贷款的应付利息就可以细分为具有不同期限和信用风险的“条带”。这种新型抵押贷款支持证券(称为担保抵押贷款债券)的首次发行于1983年6月。 51这标志着美国金融新时代的到来。

For American taxpayers, the Savings and Loans debacle was a hugely expensive lesson in the perils of ill-considered deregulation. But even as the S&Ls were going belly up, they offered another very different group of Americans a fast track to megabucks. To the bond traders at Salomon Brothers, the New York investment bank, the breakdown of the New Deal mortgage system was not a crisis but a wonderful opportunity. As profit-hungry as their language was profane, the self-styled ‘Big Swinging Dicks’ at Salomon saw a way of exploiting the gyrating interest rates of the early 1980s. It was the chief mortgage trader Lewis Ranieri at Salomon who stepped up when desperate Savings and Loans began to sell their mortgages in a vain bid to stay solvent. Needless to say, ‘Lou’ bought them up at rock-bottom prices. With his broad girth, cheap shirts and Brooklyn wisecracks, Ranieri (who had started working for Salomon in the mailroom) personified the new Wall Street, the antithesis of the preppie investment bankers in their Brooks Brothers suits and braces. The idea was to reinvent mortgages by bundling thousands of them together as the backing for new and alluring securities that could be sold as alternatives to traditional government and corporate bonds – in short, to convert mortgages into bonds. Once lumped together, the interest payments due on the mortgages could be subdivided into ‘strips’ with different maturities and credit risks. The first issue of this new kind of mortgage-backed security (known as a collateralized mortgage obligation) happened in June 1983.51 It was the dawn of a new era in American finance.

这一过程被称为证券化,它是一项从根本上改变华尔街的创新,唤醒了此前沉寂的债券市场,并开启了一个匿名交易比人际关系更为重要的新时代。然而,在危机时刻,联邦政府再次挺身而出,承担了所有费用。因为大多数抵押贷款仍然享有房利美、房地美或吉利美这三家政府支持的机构提供的隐性担保,这意味着以这些抵押贷款为抵押的债券实际上可以被视为政府债券,从而达到“投资级”标准。1980年至2007年间,此类由政府支持企业(GSE)支持的抵押贷款支持证券的发行量从从2亿美元到4万亿美元。随着私人债券保险公司的出现,像所罗门兄弟这样的公司也可以提供所谓“非标准贷款”的证券化服务,这些贷款不符合政府支持企业(GSE)的担保条件。到2007年,私人资本池足以将2万亿美元的住房抵押贷款债务证券化。 52 1980年,住房抵押贷款市场仅有10%实现了证券化;到2007年,这一比例上升至56%。*

The process was called securitization and it was an innovation that fundamentally transformed Wall Street, blowing the dust off a previously sleepy bond market and ushering in a new era in which anonymous transactions would count for more than personal relationships. Once again, however, it was the federal government that stood ready to pick up the tab in a crisis. For the majority of mortgages continued to enjoy an implicit guarantee from the government-sponsored trio of Fannie, Freddie or Ginnie, meaning that bonds which used those mortgages as collateral could be represented as virtually government bonds, and hence ‘investment grade’. Between 1980 and 2007 the volume of such GSE-backed mortgage-backed securities grew from $200 million to $4 trillion. With the advent of private bond insurers, firms like Salomon could also offer to securitize so-called non-conforming loans not eligible for GSE guarantees. By 2007 private pools of capital sufficed to securitize $2 trillion in residential mortgage debt.52 In 1980 only 10 per cent of the home mortgage market had been securitized; by 2007 it had risen to 56 per cent.*

1980年代华尔街的烈火焚烧,不仅烧毁了人性的虚荣,也烧毁了电影《生活多美好》中所描绘的那种商业模式的最后残余。曾经,抵押贷款人和借款人之间存在着有意义的社会联系。吉米·斯图尔特既认识储户,也认识借款人。相比之下,在证券化市场(就像在太空一样),没人能听到你的呼救——因为你支付的抵押贷款利息最终会落入一个根本不知道你存在的人手中。这种转变对普通房主的全部影响,直到二十年后才显现出来。

It was not only human vanities that ended up on the bonfire that was 1980s Wall Street. It was also the last vestiges of the business model depicted in It’s a Wonderful Life. Once there had been meaningful social ties between mortgage lenders and borrowers. Jimmy Stewart knew both the depositors and the debtors. By contrast, in a securitized market (just like in space) no one can hear you scream – because the interest you pay on your mortgage is ultimately going to someone who has no idea you exist. The full implications of this transition for ordinary homeowners would become apparent only twenty years later.


在英语世界,我们往往认为房地产投资是稳赚不赔的买卖。致富之道在于投资房地产市场。事实上,投资其他任何东西都是傻瓜。然而,这种所谓“真理”的惊人之处在于,现实往往与它背道而驰。假设你在1987年第一季度向美国房地产市场投资了10万美元。根据联邦住房企业监管办公室(OFEE)的房价指数或凯斯-席勒全国房价指数,到2007年第一季度,你的投资大约会翻三倍,达到27.5万至29.9万美元。但如果你把同样的钱投资到标普500指数(美国股市基准指数),结果却截然不同。如果继续将股息收入再投资于该指数,最终您将拥有77.2万美元的可支配资金,是投资房地产收益的两倍多。在英国,情况也类似。如果您在1987年投资10万英镑购买房产,根据Nationwide房价指数,20年后您的投资将翻四倍多。但如果您投资于富时全股指数,您的财富将增长近七倍。当然,房屋和股票市场指数之间存在一个重要的区别:您无法住在股票市场指数中。(另一方面,地方房产税通常针对房地产而非金融资产。)为了公平比较,必须考虑您拥有房产所节省的租金(或者如果您拥有两处房产并将其中一处出租,则可以收取的租金)。一个简单的计算方法是直接扣除股息和租金。这样一来,两者之间的差异就会有所缩小。 1987年后的二十年间,标普500指数(不计股息)上涨了五倍多,仍然轻松跑赢房地产市场。如果将租金收入计入房地产投资组合,并将股息计入股票投资组合,两者之间的差距会进一步缩小,但并未完全消除,因为在此期间,平均租金收益率从房地产繁荣时期的约5%下降到仅3.5%(换句话说,一套典型的10万美元房产的平均月租金不到416美元)。 53相比之下,英国股市市值增长速度比美国更快,股息也成为投资者更重要的收入来源。与此同时,对新建住房供应的限制(例如保护“绿化带”区域的法律)推高了租金。因此,忽略股息和租金收入,就等于抹杀了股票相对于房地产的优势。从1987年到2007年纯粹的资本增值来看,砖瓦(涨幅为4.5倍)的表现优于股票(涨幅仅为3.3倍)。只有将时间追溯到1979年,英国股票的表现才会超过英国砖瓦。*

We tend to assume in the English-speaking world that property is a one-way bet. The way to get rich is to play the property market. In fact, you’re a mug to invest in anything else. The remarkable thing about this supposed truth is how often reality gives it the lie. Suppose you had put $100,000 into the US property market back in the first quarter of 1987. According to either the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight index or the Case-Shiller national home price index, you would have roughly trebled your money by the first quarter of 2007, to between $275,000 and $299,000. But if you had put the same money into the S&P 500 (the benchmark US stock market index), and had continued to reinvest the dividend income in that index, you would have ended up with $772,000 to play with, more than double what you would have made on bricks and mortar. In the UK the differential is similar. If you had put £100,000 into property in 1987, according to the Nationwide house price index, you would have more than quadrupled your money after twenty years. But if you had put it in the FTSE All Share index you would be nearly seven times richer. There is, of course, an important difference between a house and a stock market index: you cannot live inside a stock market index. (On the other hand, local property taxes usually fall on real estate not financial assets.) For the sake of a fair comparison, allowance must therefore be made for the rent you save by owning your house (or the rent you can collect if you own two properties and let the other out). A simple way to proceed is simply to strip out both dividends and rents. In that case the difference is somewhat reduced. In the two decades after 1987 the S&P 500, excluding dividends, rose by a factor of just over five, still comfortably beating housing. The differential is also narrowed, but again not eliminated, if you add rental income to the property portfolio and include dividends on the stock portfolio, since average rental yields in the period declined from around 5 per cent to just 3.5 per cent at the peak of the real estate boom (in other words, a typical $100,000 property would have brought in an average monthly rent of less than $416).53 In the British case, by contrast, stock market capitalization has grown less slowly than in the US, while dividends have been a more important source of income to investors. At the same time, restrictions on the supply of new housing (such as laws protecting ‘greenbelt’ areas) have bolstered rents. To omit dividends and rents is therefore to remove the advantage of stocks over property. In terms of pure capital appreciation between 1987 and 2007, bricks and mortar (up by a factor of 4.5) out-performed shares (up by a factor of just 3.3). Only if one takes the story back to 1979 do British stocks beat British bricks.*

然而,在将住房与其他形式的资本资产进行比较时,还有三个其他因素需要考虑。首先是折旧。股票不会磨损,也不需要更换屋顶;而房屋则会。其次是流动性。作为资产,房屋变现的成本远高于股票。第三是波动性。自二战以来,住房市场的波动性远低于股票市场(这在很大程度上是因为房地产市场存在交易成本)。但这并不意味着房价从未偏离过稳步上涨的轨道。例如,在1989年至1995年间,英国的平均房价下跌了18%,经通胀调整后的实际跌幅超过三分之一(37%)。在伦敦,实际跌幅接近47%。 54在日本,1990年至2000年间,房价下跌了超过60%。当然,在我撰写本书的这段时间里,美国的房价——一代人以来首次——一直在下跌。而且跌势持续。从2006年7月的峰值来看,凯斯-席勒“综合20”房价指数(涵盖美国20个大城市的房价)到2008年2月已经下跌了15%。当月,年化跌幅达到13%,这是自20世纪30年代初以来从未出现过的数字。在一些城市——例如凤凰城、圣地亚哥、洛杉矶和迈阿密——房价跌幅甚至高达五分之一或四分之一。此外,在我撰写本书时(2008年5月),大多数专家仍然预测房价还会进一步下跌。

There are, however, three other considerations to bear in mind when trying to compare housing with other forms of capital asset. The first is depreciation. Stocks do not wear out and require new roofs; houses do. The second is liquidity. As assets, houses are a great deal more expensive to convert into cash than stocks. The third is volatility. Housing markets since the Second World War have been far less volatile than stock markets (not least because of the transactions costs associated with the real estate market). Yet that is not to say that house prices have never deviated from a steady upward path. In Britain between 1989 and 1995, for example, the average house price fell by 18 per cent or in real, inflation-adjusted terms by more than a third (37 per cent). In London the real decline was closer to 47 per cent.54 In Japan between 1990 and 2000, property prices fell by over 60 per cent. And, of course, in the time that I have been writing this book, property prices in the United States – for the first time in a generation – have been going down. And down. From its peak in July 2006, the Case-Shiller ‘composite 20’ index of home prices in twenty big American cities had declined 15 per cent by February 2008. In that month the annualized rate of decline reached 13 per cent, a figure not seen since the early 1930s. In some cities – Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles and Miami – the total decline was as much as a fifth or a quarter. Moreover, at the time of writing (May 2008), a majority of experts still anticipated further falls.

在经济萧条的底特律,房价下跌的趋势早在2005年12月就开始了,到2007年7月我到访这座城市时,房价已经下跌了超过10%。我去底特律是因为我感觉那里正在发生的事情预示着美国乃至整个英语世界未来的发展趋势。短短十年间,底特律的房价——或许除了新奥尔良之外,底特律的住房存量在美国所有城市中垫底——房价上涨了近50%;与全国性的房价泡沫(平均房价上涨了180%)相比,涨幅并不算大,但考虑到该市长期低迷的经济状况,仍然难以解释。正如我所发现的,原因在于住房市场规则的根本性变化,底特律西外环路(West Outer Drive)的经历便是最好的例证。这条繁忙但体面的街道两侧林立着带大草坪和车库的独立式住宅,是中产阶级的聚集地。这里曾是底特律音乐人(Motown)的故乡,如今却只是美国经济中一个庞大“国中之国”——也就是所谓的“次级经济”(Subprimia)——中一条普通的街道。

In depressed Detroit, the housing slide started earlier, in December 2005, and had already dragged house prices down by more than ten per cent when I visited the city in July 2007. I went to Detroit because I had the feeling that what was happening there was the shape of things to come in the United States as a whole and perhaps throughout the English-speaking world. In the space of ten years, house prices in Detroit – which probably possesses the worst housing stock of any American city other than New Orleans – had risen by nearly 50 per cent; not much compared with the nationwide bubble (which saw average house prices rise 180 per cent), but still hard to explain given the city’s chronically depressed economic state. As I discovered, the explanation lay in fundamental changes in the rules of the housing game, changes exemplified by the experience of Detroit’s West Outer Drive, a busy but respectable middle-class thoroughfare of substantial detached houses with large lawns and garages. Once the home of Motown’s finest, today it is just another street in a huge sprawling country within a country: the developing economy within the United States,55 otherwise known as Subprimia.

“次级”抵押贷款由当地经纪人瞄准信用记录不良或断断续续的家庭或社区。正如巨额抵押贷款金额过大而无法获得房利美(Fannie Mae)的批准(以及政府的隐性担保)一样,次级抵押贷款风险过高。然而,正是这种高风险性使得它们对贷款机构而言似乎有利可图。这些并非罗斯福新政时期推出的那种30年期固定利率抵押贷款。相反,其中很大一部分是浮动利率抵押贷款(ARM)——换句话说,利率会根据短期贷款利率的变化而变化。许多贷款都是……此外,还有只付息抵押贷款,无需偿还本金,即使本金占抵押房产评估价值的100%。而且大多数贷款都有“诱导期”,即最初的两年利息支付被人为地压低,从而将贷款成本后置。所有这些手段都是为了立即降低借款人的偿债成本。但次级贷款合同的细则却为贷款人带来了巨额收益。底特律一笔特别恶劣的次级贷款,前两年的利率为9.75%,但之后却比银行间相互借贷的基准短期利率(通常是伦敦银行间同业拆借利率,即Libor)高出9.125个百分点。即使在次贷危机爆发之前,Libor也已经超过5%,这意味着贷款第三年的利息支出将大幅上涨。

‘Subprime’ mortgage loans are aimed by local brokers at families or neighbourhoods with poor or patchy credit histories. Just as jumbo mortgages are too big to qualify for Fannie Mae’s seal of approval (and implicit government guarantee), subprime mortgages are too risky. Yet it was precisely their riskiness that made them seem potentially lucrative to lenders. These were not the old thirty-year fixed-rate mortgages invented in the New Deal. On the contrary, a high proportion were adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) – in other words, the interest rate could vary according to changes in short-term lending rates. Many were also interest-only mortgages, without amortization (repayment of principal), even when the principal represented 100 per cent of the assessed value of the mortgaged property. And most had introductory ‘teaser’ periods, whereby the initial interest payments – usually for the first two years – were kept artificially low, back-loading the cost of the loan. All of these devices were intended to allow an immediate reduction in the debt-servicing costs of the borrower. But the small print of subprime contracts implied major gains for the lender. One particularly egregious subprime loan in Detroit carried an interest rate of 9.75 per cent for the first two years, but after that a margin of 9.125 percentage points over the benchmark short-term rate at which banks lend each other money: conventionally the London interbank offered rate (Libor). Even before the subprime crisis struck, that already stood above 5 per cent, implying a huge upward leap in interest payments in the third year of the loan.

次级贷款如同雪崩般涌入底特律,如同倾盆大雨。广播、电视、直邮广告铺天盖地,经纪人和代理人蜂拥而至,兜售着看似诱人的贷款方案。仅在2006年,次级贷款机构就向底特律22个邮政编码区域注入了超过10亿美元的资金。在包含西外环路5100街区的48235邮政编码区域,2002年至2006年间,次级抵押贷款占所有贷款的一半以上。5100街区的26户家庭中,有7户申请了次级贷款。值得注意是,这些贷款中只有少数流向了首次购房者。几乎所有贷款都是再融资交易,借款人可以将房屋当作提款机,把现有房屋净值变现。大多数人将所得款项用于偿还信用卡债务、房屋装修或购买新的耐用消费品。然而,在其他地方,长期利率下降和日益诱人的因素相结合,抵押贷款确实吸引了新的购房者进入房地产市场。到2005年,美国69%的家庭拥有了自己的住房,而十年前这一比例为64%。其中约一半的增长可归因于次贷热潮。值得注意的是,次贷借款人中少数族裔的比例过高。事实上,我在底特律开车时不禁怀疑,“次贷”是否实际上是“黑人”的一种新的金融委婉说法。这并非空穴来风。根据马萨诸塞州经济适用房联盟的一项研究,2005年波士顿都市区获得单户住宅贷款的黑人和拉丁裔借款人中,55%的人获得了次贷,而白人借款人中这一比例仅为13%。华盛顿互惠银行超过四分之三的黑人和拉丁裔借款人被归类为次贷,而白人借款人中这一比例仅为17%。57根据住房和城市发展部 (HUD) 的数据,2002 年至 2007 年间,少数族裔拥有的房产增加了 310 万套。

Subprime lending hit Detroit like an avalanche of Monopoly money. The city was bombarded with radio, television, direct-mail advertisements and armies of agents and brokers, all offering what sounded like attractive deals. In 2006 alone, subprime lenders injected more than a billion dollars into twenty-two Detroit ZIP codes. In the 48235 ZIP code, which includes the 5100 block of West Outer Drive, subprime mortgages accounted for more than half of all loans made between 2002 and 2006. Seven of the twenty-six households on the 5100 block took out subprime loans.56 Note that only a minority of these loans were going to first-time buyers. They were nearly all refinancing deals, which allowed borrowers to treat their homes as cash machines, converting their existing equity into cash. Most used the proceeds to pay off credit card debts, carry out renovations or buy new consumer durables.* Elsewhere, however, the combination of declining long-term interest rates and ever more alluring mortgage deals did attract new buyers into the housing market. By 2005, 69 per cent of all US households were home-owners, compared with 64 per cent ten years before. Around half of that increase can be attributed to the subprime lending boom. Significantly, a disproportionate number of subprime borrowers belonged to ethnic minorities. Indeed, I found myself wondering as I drove around Detroit if subprime was in fact a new financial euphemism for black. This was no idle supposition. According to a study by the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, 55 per cent of black and Latino borrowers in metropolitan Boston who had obtained loans for single-family homes in 2005 had been given subprime mortgages, compared with just 13 per cent of white borrowers. More than three quarters of black and Latino borrowers from Washington Mutual were classed as subprime, compared with just 17 per cent of white borrowers.57 According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), minority ownership increased by 3.1 million between 2002 and 2007.

这无疑是财产所有制民主的巅峰时期。新的抵押贷款市场似乎正在使数十万曾被信用评级机构和隐晦的种族偏见排除在主流金融体系之外的人们,实现拥有住房的美国梦。

Here, surely, was the zenith of the property-owning democracy. The new mortgage market seemed to be making the American dream of home ownership a reality for hundreds of thousands of people who had once been excluded from mainstream finance by credit-rating agencies and thinly veiled racial prejudice.

随后,艾伦·格林斯潘因其在担任美联储主席的最后几年未能有效监管抵押贷款而受到批评。然而,尽管他在2004年的一次演讲中发表了臭名昭著(后又撤回)的关于浮动利率抵押贷款的支持言论,格林斯潘并非扩大住房拥有率的主要倡导者。将近年来所有过度行为都归咎于货币政策也是不可信的。

Criticism would subsequently be levelled at Alan Greenspan for failing adequately to regulate mortgage lending in his last years as Federal Reserve chairman. Yet, despite his notorious (and subsequently retracted) endorsement of adjustable-rate mortgages in a 2004 speech, Greenspan was not the principal proponent of wider home ownership. Nor is it credible to blame all the excesses of recent years on monetary policy.

“我们希望每个美国人都能拥有自己的住房,”乔治·W·布什总统在2002年10月曾这样说道。布什总统曾要求贷款机构在十年结束前帮助550万少数族裔新购房者,并于2003年签署了《美国梦首付法案》,该法案旨在……政府为低收入群体首次购房提供补贴。政府鼓励贷款机构不要向次级贷款借款人索要全部文件。房利美和房地美也受到住房和城市发展部的压力,要求其支持次级贷款市场。正如布什在2003年12月所说:“让更多人拥有自己的住房符合我们的国家利益。” 58几乎没有人反对。事实上,国会中的民主党人与布什一样,都致力于扩大住房拥有率。自由派学者也是如此。2007年11月,哈佛大学阿尔方斯·弗莱彻讲席教授、W.E.B.杜波依斯非洲及非裔美国人研究所所长亨利·路易斯·盖茨(小亨利·路易斯·盖茨)在《纽约时报》撰文,似乎对这一趋势表示欢迎。他指出,在他研究过的20位成功的非裔美国人中,有15位(其中包括奥普拉·温弗瑞和乌比·戈德堡)是“至少有一支前奴隶的后裔,他们在1920年之前获得了财产”。尽管几个月前房地产泡沫已经破裂,盖茨还是提出了一个令人惊讶的解决“黑人贫困和功能失调”问题的方案——即“将财产给予那些曾经被视为财产的人”:

‘We want everybody in America to own their own home,’ President George W. Bush had said in October 2002. Having challenged lenders to create 5.5 million new minority homeowners by the end of the decade, Bush signed the American Dream Downpayment Act in 2003, a measure designed to subsidize first-time house purchases among lower income groups. Lenders were encouraged by the administration not to press subprime borrowers for full documentation. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac also came under pressure from HUD to support the subprime market. As Bush put it in December 2003: ‘It is in our national interest that more people own their home.’58 Few dissented. Indeed, Democrats in Congress were just as committed as Bush to the idea of widening home ownership. So were liberal academics. Writing in the New York Times in November 2007, Henry Louis (‘Skip’) Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, appeared to welcome the trend, pointing out that fifteen out of twenty successful African-Americans he had studied (among them Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg) were the descendants of ‘at least one line of former slaves who managed to obtain property by 1920’. Heedless of the bursting of the property bubble months before, Gates suggested a surprising solution to the problem of ‘black poverty and dysfunction’ – namely ‘to give property to the people who had once been defined as property’:

或许,最有可能提出建议的,是玛格丽特·撒切尔。上世纪80年代,她让英国150万公共住房项目的居民拥有了自己的房子。这无疑是撒切尔夫人最开明的举措,或许进步人士应该借鉴她的经验……解决黑人贫困问题的创新之举……是探索如何让租户成为房主……对于贫困的黑人来说,只有当他们在美国社会拥有所有权时,真正的进步才会到来。拥有房产的人会对自己的未来和社会产生归属感。他们会学习、储蓄、工作、奋斗并参与投票。而那些深陷租房困境的人则不会…… 59

Perhaps Margaret Thatcher, of all people, suggested a program that might help. In the 1980s, she turned 1.5 million residents of public housing projects in Britain into homeowners. It was certainly the most liberal thing Mrs Thatcher did, and perhaps progressives should borrow a leaf from her playbook . . . A bold and innovative approach to the problem of black poverty . . . would be to look at ways to turn tenants into homeowners . . . For the black poor, real progress may come only once they have an ownership stake in American society. People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society. They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not . . .59

孟菲斯弗雷泽地区的黑人社区领袖比尼·塞尔夫指出了盖茨论点的致命缺陷:“美国梦是拥有住房,而我担心的是——虽然这个梦想很美好——但我们并没有真正做好准备。人们没有意识到,如今的房地产行业、评估行业和抵押贷款行业能够真正推动人们住进他们很多时候根本买不起的房子。” 60

Beanie Self, a black community leader in the Frayser area of Memphis, identified the fatal flaw in Gates’s argument: ‘The American Dream is home ownership, and one of the things that concerns me is – while the dream is wonderful – we are not really prepared for it. People don’t realize you have a real estate industry, an appraisal industry, a mortgage industry now that can really push to put people into houses that a lot of times they really can’t afford.’60


次级贷款作为一种商业模式运作得非常成功——只要利率保持低位,只要人们保住工作,只要房地产价格持续上涨。当然,这样的条件不可能永远持续下去,尤其是在像底特律这样的城市。但这并没有让次级贷款机构感到担忧。他们只是效仿了主流抵押贷款机构在20世纪80年代开辟的道路。他们没有将自己的资金置于风险之中,而是在签署原始贷款合同时赚取丰厚的佣金,然后将贷款批量转售给华尔街银行。这些银行反过来又将这些贷款打包成高收益的住宅抵押贷款支持证券(RMBS),并将其出售给世界各地的投资者,所有投资者都渴望获得哪怕百分之几个百分点的额外资本回报。经过重新包装,这些次级证券可以变成担保债务凭证(CDO),从而将原本风险高、借款人信誉不佳的贷款转化为AAA级投资级证券。只需获得两大评级机构之一——穆迪或标准普尔——的认证,证明至少这些证券中最顶层的证券不太可能违约即可。诚然,较低的“夹层”和“权益”层级风险更大;但另一方面,它们的利率也更高。

As a business model subprime lending worked beautifully – as long as interest rates stayed low, as long as people kept their jobs and as long as real estate prices continued to rise. Of course, such conditions could not be relied upon to last, least of all in a city like Detroit. But that did not worry the subprime lenders. They simply followed the trail blazed by mainstream mortgage lenders in the 1980s. Instead of putting their own money at risk, they pocketed fat commissions on signature of the original loan contracts and then resold their loans in bulk to Wall Street banks. The banks, in turn, bundled the loans into high-yielding residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) and sold them on to investors around the world, all eager for a few hundredths of a percentage point more return on their capital. Repackaged as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), these subprime securities could be transformed from risky loans to flaky borrowers into triple-A-rated investment-grade securities. All that was required was certification from one of the two dominant rating agencies, Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s, that at least the top tier of these securities was unlikely to go into default. The lower ‘mezzanine’ and ‘equity’ tiers were admittedly more risky; then again, they paid higher interest rates.

这种金融奇观的关键在于,底特律的抵押贷款借款人和最终收到利息的人之间可能相隔数千英里。风险从美国各州分散到全球各地。澳大利亚的养老基金被用于公共卫生网络,甚至北极圈以外的城镇议会也参与其中。例如,在挪威,拉纳、赫姆内斯、哈特菲耶尔达尔和纳尔维克等市政府将纳税人约1.2亿美元的资金投资于以美国次级抵押贷款为抵押的担保债务凭证(CDO)。当时,这些“结构性产品”的销售商吹嘘证券化能够将风险分配给“最能承担风险的人”。然而,后来人们才发现,风险实际上是分配给了最不了解风险的人。那些最了解次级贷款风险的人——那些直接与借款人打交道并了解其经济状况的人——承担的风险最小。他们可以发放100%贷款价值比的“忍者”贷款(借款人没有收入、没有工作、也没有资产),并在同一天将其出售给CDO业务中的大型银行。很快,风险就如同漂流到峡湾深处一般,消失得无影无踪。

The key to this financial alchemy was that there could be thousands of miles between the mortgage borrowers in Detroit and the people who ended up receiving their interest payments. The risk was spread across the globe from American state pension funds to public health networks in Australia and even to town councils beyond the Arctic Circle. In Norway, for example, the municipalities of Rana, Hemnes, Hattfjelldal and Narvik invested some $120 million of their taxpayers’ money in CDOs secured on American subprime mortgages. At the time, the sellers of these ‘structured products’ boasted that securitization was having the effect of allocating risk ‘to those best able to bear it’. Only later did it turn out that risk was being allocated to those least able to understand it. Those who knew best the flakiness of subprime loans – the people who dealt directly with the borrowers and knew their economic circumstances – bore the least risk. They could make a 100 per cent loan-to-value ‘NINJA’ loan (to someone with No Income No Job or Assets) and sell it on the same day to one of the big banks in the CDO business. In no time at all, the risk was floating up a fjord.

在底特律,次级抵押贷款的兴起实际上与汽车行业的持续衰退同时发生,这场衰退导致该市损失了2万个工作岗位。这预示着美国经济将出现更广泛的放缓,而货币政策的收紧几乎是不可避免的,因为美联储将短期利率从1%提高到5.25%;这对平均抵押贷款利率产生了虽不大但却显著的影响,利率上涨了约四分之一(从5.34%升至6.66%)。这种看似无害的信贷环境变化对次级市场的影响却是毁灭性的。一旦优惠利率到期,抵押贷款利率重置为更高的新利率,底特律数百户家庭迅速拖欠了抵押贷款。早在2007年3月,在48235邮政编码区域,大约三分之一的次级抵押贷款逾期超过60天,实际上已濒临被取消赎回权。这一举动导致房地产泡沫破裂,房价自上世纪90年代初以来首次开始下跌。房价下跌伊始,那些背负100%抵押贷款的人发现,他们的房屋价值低于债务总额。随着房价进一步下跌,越来越多的房主发现自己陷入了负资产困境,这个词自 20 世纪 90 年代初以来在英国就已为人熟知。从这个意义上讲,西外环路事件预示着美国房地产市场一场更广泛的危机,其影响将撼动西方世界的金融体系根基。

In Detroit the rise of subprime mortgages had in fact coincided with a new slump in the inexorably declining automobile industry that cost the city 20,000 jobs. This anticipated a wider American slowdown, an almost inevitable consequence of a tightening of monetary policy as the Federal Reserve raised short-term interest rates from 1 per cent to 5¼ per cent; this had a modest but nevertheless significant impact on average mortgage rates, which went up by roughly a quarter (from 5.34 to 6.66 per cent). The effect on the subprime market of this seemingly innocuous change in credit conditions was devastating. As soon as the teaser rates expired and the mortgages reset at new and much higher interest rates, hundreds of Detroit households swiftly fell behind with their mortgage payments. As early as March 2007, about one in three subprime mortgages in the 48235 ZIP code were more than sixty days in arrears, effectively on the verge of foreclosure. The effect was to burst the real estate bubble, causing house prices to start falling for the first time since the early 1990s. As soon as this began to happen, those who had taken out 100 per cent mortgages found their homes worth less than their debts. The further house prices fell, the more homeowners found themselves with negative equity, a term familiar in Britain since the early 1990s. In this respect, West Outer Drive was a harbinger of a wider crisis of the American real estate market, the ramifications of which would rock the financial system of the Western world to its foundations.


在一个闷热的周五下午,我刚从底特律抵达孟菲斯不久,就亲眼目睹了五十多栋房屋在孟菲斯法院的台阶上被拍卖。每栋房屋的拍卖都是因为抵押贷款机构因房主无力支付利息而取消了他们的抵押赎回权。*孟菲斯不仅是美国的破产之都(正如我们在第一章中看到的),到2007年夏天,它也迅速成为止赎之都。据我了解,过去五年里,该市四分之一的家庭都收到了止赎通知。而次级抵押贷款再次成为问题的根源。仅在2006年,次级贷款公司就向孟菲斯的14个邮政编码区域发放了4.6亿美元的贷款。我所目睹的仅仅是止赎浪潮的开始。2007年3月,负责任贷款中心预测,止赎房屋的数量可能达到240万套。61这可能被低估了。截至撰写本文时(2008 年 5 月),约有 180 万笔抵押贷款违约,但估计有 900 万美国家庭(相当于每十户独栋住宅中就有一户的居住者)已经陷入负资产。约 11% 的次级可调利率抵押贷款 (ARM) 已被取消赎回权。据瑞士信贷称,未来五年内所有类型抵押贷款的取消赎回权总数可能达到 650 万笔。这可能使美国所有家庭的 8.4% 陷入困境。房主,或占有抵押贷款者的12.7%,失去了他们的房屋。62

On a sultry Friday afternoon, shortly after arriving in Memphis from Detroit, I watched more than fifty homes being sold off on the steps of the Memphis courthouse. In each case it was because mortgage lenders had foreclosed on the owners for failing to keep up with their interest payments.* Not only is Memphis the bankruptcy capital of America (as we saw in Chapter 1). By the summer of 2007 it was also fast becoming the foreclosure capital. Over the last five years, I was told, one in four households in the city had received a notice threatening foreclosure. And once again subprime mortgages were the root of the problem. In 2006 alone subprime finance companies had lent $460 million to fourteen Memphis ZIP codes. What I was witnessing was just the beginning of a flood of foreclosures. In March 2007 the Center for Responsible Lending predicted that the number of foreclosures could reach 2.4 million.61 This may turn out to have been an underestimate. At the time of writing (May 2008), around 1.8 million mortgages are in default, but an estimated 9 million American households, or the occupants of one in every ten single-family homes, have already fallen into negative equity. About 11 per cent of subprime ARMs are already in foreclosure. According to Credit Suisse, the total number of foreclosures on all types of mortgages could end up being 6.5 million over the next five years. That could put 8.4 per cent of all American homeowners, or 12.7 per cent of those with mortgages, out of their homes.62

自2007年初夏次贷市场开始恶化以来,冲击波席卷全球信贷市场,导致一些对冲基金破产,并给银行和其他金融机构造成数千亿美元的损失。主要问题出在担保债务凭证(CDO)上,2006年售出的CDO总额超过5000亿美元,其中约一半包含次贷风险敞口。事实证明,由于对次贷违约率的错误估计,许多CDO定价过高。随着就连AAA级证券也开始违约,那些专门购买高风险CDO的对冲基金首当其冲。尽管早在2007年2月汇丰银行承认在美国抵押贷款上遭受巨额损失时,就已出现一些问题迹象,但大多数分析师认为次贷危机的开端是同年6月。当时,贝尔斯登旗下的两家对冲基金被美林证券要求追加抵押品。美林证券是另一家曾向它们提供贷款的投资银行,但现在担心它们过度持有次级抵押贷款支持证券。贝尔斯登救助了其中一只基金,却任由另一只基金倒闭。次月,评级机构开始下调大量RMBS CDO(即“住宅抵押贷款支持证券担保债务凭证”,这个术语本身就体现了此类产品的复杂性)的评级。随着评级下调,持有这些证券的各类金融机构都面临着巨额损失。系统中的杠杆(债务)规模极大地加剧了这一问题。尤其是对冲基金,为了放大收益,它们从主要经纪商——银行——那里借入了巨额资金。与此同时,各家银行一直在掩盖自身的风险敞口,它们将与次贷相关的资产存放在被称为“导管”的表外实体中。战略投资工具(SIV,无疑是这场危机所有缩写词中最贴切的一个),其资金来源依赖于商业票据市场和隔夜银行间贷款市场的短期借款。随着对交易对手风险(金融交易中另一方可能破产的风险)的担忧加剧,这些信贷市场陷入停滞。一些评论员至少一年来一直在警告的流动性危机在2007年8月爆发,当时美国住房抵押贷款公司(American Home Mortgage)申请破产,法国巴黎银行暂停了三只抵押贷款投资基金,而Countrywide Financial则提取了其全部110亿美元的信贷额度。几乎没有人预料到的是,底特律和孟菲斯等城市的低收入家庭的次级抵押贷款违约会引发如此巨大的金融灾难:*一家银行(北方岩石银行)被国有化;另一家银行(贝尔斯登)在美联储担保的交易中被低价出售给竞争对手;众多对冲基金倒闭;银行的“减记”金额至少达3180亿美元;预计总损失超过一万亿美元。次贷危机这只蝴蝶扇动翅膀,引发了一场全球飓风。

Since the subprime mortgage market began to turn sour in the early summer of 2007, shockwaves have been spreading through all the world’s credit markets, wiping out some hedge funds and costing hundreds of billions of dollars to banks and other financial companies. The main problem lay with CDOs, over half a trillion dollars of which had been sold in 2006, of which around half contained subprime exposure. It turned out that many of these CDOs had been seriously over-priced, as a result of erroneous estimates of likely subprime default rates. As even triple-A-rated securities began going into default, hedge funds that had specialized in buying the highest-risk CDO tranches were the first to suffer. Although there had been signs of trouble since February 2007, when HSBC admitted to heavy losses on US mortgages, most analysts would date the beginning of the subprime crisis from June of that year, when two hedge funds owned by Bear Stearns* were asked to post additional collateral by Merrill Lynch, another investment bank that had lent them money but was now concerned about their excessive exposure to subprime-backed assets. Bear bailed out one fund, but let the other collapse. The following month the ratings agencies began to downgrade scores of RMBS CDOs (short for ‘residential mortgage-backed security collateralized debt obligations’, the very term testifying to the over-complex nature of these products). As they did so, all kinds of financial institutions holding these securities found themselves staring huge losses in the face. The problem was greatly magnified by the amount of leverage (debt) in the system. Hedge funds in particular had borrowed vast sums from their prime brokers – banks – in order to magnify the returns they could generate. The banks, meanwhile, had been disguising their own exposure by parking subprime-related assets in off-balance-sheet entities known as conduits and strategic investment vehicles (SIVs, surely the most apt of all the acronyms of the crisis), which relied for funding on short-term borrowings on the markets for commercial paper and overnight interbank loans. As fears rose about counterparty risk (the danger that the other party in a financial transaction may go bust), those credit markets seized up. The liquidity crisis that some commentators had been warning about for at least a year struck in August 2007, when American Home Mortgage filed for bankruptcy, BNP Paribas suspended three mortgage investment funds and Countrywide Financial drew down its entire $11 billion credit line. What scarcely anyone had anticipated was that defaults on subprime mortgages by low-income households in cities like Detroit and Memphis could unleash so much financial havoc:* one bank (Northern Rock) nationalized; another (Bear Stearns) sold off cheaply to a competitor in a deal underwritten by the Fed; numerous hedge funds wound up; ‘write-downs’ by banks amounting to at least $318 billion; total anticipated losses in excess of one trillion dollars. The subprime butterfly had flapped its wings and triggered a global hurricane.

这场危机的诸多讽刺之处在于,它最终可能对政府支持的“房利美”——这个房利美体系的“母亲”——造成致命打击。63政府政策的一个后果是,一方面提高了房利美及其“后继者”房利美和吉利美持有的抵押贷款比例,另一方面却降低了曾经是该体系关键组成部分的原始政府担保的重要性。1955年至2006年间,政府承销的非农抵押贷款比例从35%下降到5%。但同期,这些政府支持企业持有的抵押贷款份额却从4%上升到2003年的峰值43%。 64联邦住房企业监管办公室一直在敦促房利美和房利美收购更多RMBS(包括次级抵押贷款支持的RMBS)。证券)通过放宽对其资本/资产比率的监管规则来实现。但这两家机构的总资本仅为840亿美元,仅占其资产负债表上1.7万亿美元资产的5%,更不用说它们担保的另外2.8万亿美元RMBS了。 65如果这些机构陷入困境,政府担保可能会转变为政府所有,这将对联邦预算产生重大影响。*

Among the many ironies of the crisis is that it could ultimately deal a fatal blow to the government-sponsored mother of the property-owning democracy: Fannie Mae.63 One consequence of government policy has been to increase the proportion of mortgages held by Fannie Mae and her younger siblings Freddie and Ginnie, while at the same time reducing the importance of the original government guarantees that were once a key component of the system. Between 1955 and 2006 the proportion of non-farm mortgages underwritten by the government fell from 35 to 5 per cent. But over the same period the share of mortgages held by these government-sponsored enterprises rose from 4 per cent to a peak of 43 per cent in 2003.64 The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight has been egging on Fannie and Freddie to acquire even more RMBS (including subprime-backed securities) by relaxing the rules that regulate their capital/assets ratio. But the two institutions have only $84 billion of capital between them, a mere 5 per cent of the $1.7 trillion of assets on their balance sheets, to say nothing of the further $2.8 trillion of RMBS that they have guaranteed.65 Should these institutions get into difficulties, it seems a reasonable assumption that government sponsorship could turn into government ownership, with major implications for the federal budget.*

所以,事实证明,房屋并非绝对安全的投资。房价既可能上涨也可能下跌。而且,正如我们所见,房屋的流动性很差——这意味着当你陷入财务困境时,很难快速出售。房价下跌时会“粘滞”,因为卖家不愿在经济低迷时期降低要价;结果就是大量房屋滞销,原本打算搬家的人只能眼巴巴地看着自家房子的“出售”牌子。反过来,这意味着房屋所有权往往会降低劳动力流动性,从而减缓经济复苏。这些最终都暴露出“房产民主”理念的弊端,尽管它曾经看似能将所有租户变成房主,颇具吸引力。现在的问题是,我们是否应该将这种高风险模式推广到世界其他地区。

So no, it turns out that houses are not a uniquely safe investment. Their prices can go down as well as up. And, as we have seen, houses are pretty illiquid assets – which means they are hard to sell quickly when you are in a financial jam. House prices are ‘sticky’ on the way down because sellers hate to cut the asking price in a downturn; the result is a glut of unsold properties and people who would otherwise move stuck looking at their For Sale signs. That in turn means that home ownership can tend to reduce labour mobility, thereby slowing down recovery. These turn out to be the disadvantages of the idea of property-owning democracy, appealing though it once seemed to turn all tenants into homeowners. The question that remains to be answered is whether or not we have any business exporting this high-risk model to the rest of the world.

像家庭主妇一样安全

As Safe as Housewives

基尔梅斯是布宜诺斯艾利斯南部郊区一片蔓延的贫民窟,与阿根廷首都中心优雅的林荫大道仿佛相隔万里。但住在那里的人们真的像看起来那么贫穷吗?正如秘鲁经济学家埃尔南多·德·索托所言,像基尔梅斯这样的棚户区,尽管外表破败不堪,却蕴藏着数万亿美元的未实现财富。德·索托计算得出,全球贫困人口所拥有的房地产总价值高达9.3万亿美元。他指出,这几乎相当于全球前二十大经济体所有上市公司的总市值——大约是1970年至2000年间发展中国家所获外援总额的90倍。问题在于,基尔梅斯以及世界各地无数贫民窟的居民,没有对其房屋拥有合法的产权。而没有某种形式的产权,房产就无法用作贷款抵押。德索托认为,这从根本上制约了经济增长,因为如果无法借贷,就无法筹集创业资金。潜在的企业家因此受阻,资本主义活力也因此被扼杀。66

Quilmes, a sprawling slum on the southern outskirts of Buenos Aires, seems a million miles from the elegant boulevards of the Argentine capital’s centre. But are the people who live there really as poor as they look? As Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto sees it, shanty towns like Quilmes, despite their ramshackle appearance, represent literally trillions of dollars of unrealized wealth. De Soto has calculated that the total value of the real estate occupied by the world’s poor amounts to $9.3 trillion. That, he points out, is very nearly the total market capitalization of all the listed companies in the world’s top twenty economies – and roughly ninety times all the foreign aid paid to developing countries between 1970 and 2000. The problem is that the people in Quilmes, and in countless shanty towns the world over, do not have secure legal title to their homes. And without some kind of legal title, property cannot be used as collateral for a loan. The result is a fundamental constraint on economic growth, de Soto reasons, because if you can’t borrow, you can’t raise the capital to start a business. Potential entrepreneurs are thwarted. Capitalist energies are smothered.66

造成这种困境的主要原因在于,在南美洲等地,确立房产的合法所有权极其繁琐。据世界银行统计,如今在阿根廷,房产登记大约需要30天,但过去耗时更长。在一些国家——孟加拉国和海地的情况最为糟糕——登记时间甚至可能接近300天。德索托和他的研究人员在秘鲁试图获得在国有土地上建造房屋的合法许可时,耗时六年零十一个月,期间他们不得不与52个不同的政府部门打交道。在菲律宾,直到最近,房屋所有权的正式化仍然是一个包含168个步骤的流程,涉及53个公共和私人机构,耗时13到25年不等。相比之下,在英语国家,登记房产最快只需两天,很少超过三周。在德索托看来,官僚主义的重重阻碍使得穷人的资产沦为“死资本”。就像安第斯山脉高处湖泊中的水——蕴藏着尚未开发的潜在能量。他认为,激活这种能量是让秘鲁等国家拥有更加繁荣未来的关键。只有建立起一套有效的产权制度,才能让市场合理地确定房屋的价值;才能方便地买卖房屋;才能合法地将其用作贷款抵押品;才能让房屋所有者在其他交易中承担责任。此外,将穷人排除在合法产权之外,至少可以确保他们能够自主运作。部分国家处于灰色或黑色经济区,不受国家有效监管。这造成了双重损害:一方面,它阻碍了有效征税;另一方面,它降低了国家在民众眼中的合法性。换句话说,贫穷国家之所以贫穷,是因为它们缺乏安全的产权保障,而产权保障正是成功经济的“隐形架构”。德索托承认,“产权法并非万能灵药,但它是缺失的一环……没有产权法,其他改革就无法以可持续的方式进行。” 贫穷国家也更容易在民主制度上失败,因为它们缺乏利益相关者组成的选民群体。德索托认为,“产权最终将导向民主,因为除非建立民主制度,否则市场导向的产权制度无法维系。这是投资者获得安全感的唯一途径。” 67

A large part of the trouble is that it is so bureaucratically difficult to establish legal title to property in places like South America. In Argentina today, according to the World Bank, it takes around thirty days to register a property, but it used to be much longer. In some countries – Bangladesh and Haiti are the worst – it can take closer to three hundred days. When de Soto and his researchers tried to secure legal authorization to build a house on state-owned land in Peru, it took six years and eleven months, during which they had to deal with fifty-two different government offices. In the Philippines, formalizing home ownership was until recently a 168-step process involving fifty-three public and private agencies and taking between thirteen and twenty-five years. In the English-speaking world, by contrast, it can take as little as two days and seldom more than three weeks. In de Soto’s eyes, bureaucratic obstacles to securing legal ownership make the assets of the poor so much ‘dead capital . . . like water in a lake high up in the Andes – an untapped stock of potential energy’. Breathing life into this capital, he argues, is the key to providing countries like Peru with a more prosperous future. Only with a working system of property rights can the value of a house be properly established by the market; can it easily be bought and sold; can it legally be used as collateral for loans; can its owner be held to account in other transactions he may enter into. Moreover, excluding the poor from the pale of legitimate property ownership ensures that they operate at least partially in a grey or black economic zone, beyond the reach of the state’s dead hand. This is doubly damaging. It prevents effective taxation. And it reduces the legitimacy of the state in the eyes of the populace. Poor countries are poor, in other words, because they lack secure property rights, the ‘hidden architecture’ of a successful economy. ‘Property law is not a silver bullet,’ de Soto admits, ‘but it is the missing link . . . Without property law, you will never be able to accomplish other reforms in a sustainable manner.’ And poor countries are also more likely to fail as democracies because they lack an electorate of stakeholders. ‘Property rights will eventually lead to democracy,’ de Soto has argued, ‘because you can’t sustain a market-oriented property system unless you provide a democratic system. That’s the only way investors can feel secure.’67

对某些人而言——例如曾于1992年试图用炸弹袭击刺杀他、造成三人死亡的毛派恐怖组织“光辉道路”——德索托是罪魁祸首。 68其他批评者则谴责他是如今身败名裂的秘鲁总统阿尔韦托·藤森背后的拉斯普京。而对另一些人来说,德索托致力于将私有制民主推向全球的努力使他成为英雄。美国前总统比尔·克林顿称他“可能是当今最伟大的经济学家”,而俄罗斯总统弗拉基米尔·普京则称德索托的成就“非凡”。2004年,美国自由主义智库卡托研究所授予他两年一度的米尔顿·弗里德曼奖,以表彰他“体现自由精神和实践”的工作。德索托及其自由与民主研究所曾为埃及、萨尔瓦多、加纳、海地、洪都拉斯、哈萨克斯坦、墨西哥、菲律宾和坦桑尼亚等国政府提供咨询。当然,关键问题是,他的理论在实践中是否有效?

To some – like the Maoist terrorist group Shining Path, who tried to assassinate him in 1992 in a bomb attack that killed three people – de Soto is a villain.68 Other critics denounced him as the Rasputin behind the now disgraced Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori. To others, de Soto’s efforts to globalize the property-owning democracy have made him a hero. Former President Bill Clinton has called him ‘probably the greatest living economist’, while his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, has called de Soto’s achievements ‘extraordinary’. In 2004 the American libertarian think-tank the Cato Institute awarded him the biennial Milton Friedman Prize for work that ‘exemplifies the spirit and practice of liberty’. De Soto and his Institute for Liberty and Democracy have advised governments in Egypt, El Salvador, Ghana, Haiti, Honduras, Kazakhstan, Mexico, the Philippines and Tanzania. The critical question is, of course, does his theory work in practice?

基尔梅斯为检验德索托是否真的解开了“资本之谜”提供了一个天然的实验场所。1981年,1800个家庭在这里占领了一片荒地,公然对抗当时统治阿根廷的军政府。民主恢复后,省政府没收了这片土地的原所有者,将其用于建设。这些非法占地者拥有房屋的合法所有权。然而,13位土地所有者中只有8位接受了所提供的补偿;其余的(其中一位于1998年达成和解)则进行了旷日持久的法律诉讼。结果是,一些奎尔梅斯非法占地者通过支付象征性的租金获得了房产所有权,十年后,这些租金转为正式的产权证;而另一些人则继续非法占地。如今,你可以通过房屋围栏的美观和粉刷过的墙壁来区分业主自住的房屋和其他房屋。相比之下,那些所有权仍存在争议的房屋则破败不堪。正如每个人(包括“斯基普”·盖茨)都知道的那样,业主通常比租户更爱惜自己的房产。

Quilmes provides a natural experiment to find out if de Soto really has unravelled the ‘mystery of capital’. It was here in 1981 that a group of 1,800 families defied the military junta then ruling Argentina by occupying a stretch of wasteland. After the restoration of democracy the provincial government expropriated the original owners of the land to give the squatters legal title to their homes. However, only eight of the thirteen landowners accepted the compensation they were offered; the others (one of whom settled in 1998) fought a protracted legal battle. The result was that some of the Quilmes squatters became property owners by paying a nominal sum for leases, which, after ten years, became full deeds of ownership; while others remained as squatters. Today you can tell the owner-occupied houses from the rest by their better fences and painted walls. The houses whose ownership remains contested are, by contrast, seedy shacks. As everyone (including ‘Skip’ Gates) knows, owners generally take better care of properties than tenants do.

毫无疑问,在基尔梅斯,拥有房产改变了人们的态度。一项近期研究表明,与仍然非法居住的人相比,那些拥有房产的人在态度上变得更加个人主义和物质主义。例如,当被问及“你认为金钱对幸福重要吗?”时,房主比非法居住者更有可能认为金钱重要,比例高出34%。 69然而,这一理论似乎存在缺陷,因为拥有房产并没有显著提高基尔梅斯居民的贷款便利性。只有4%的人成功获得了抵押贷款。 70在德索托的祖国秘鲁,仅仅拥有房产似乎也不足以使闲置的资本重获新生。诚然,在他最初的建议于1988年被秘鲁政府采纳后,房产登记所需时间大幅缩短(仅需一个月),交易成本更是大幅降低了99%。 1996年成立非正式财产正规化委员会后,相关部门做出了进一步努力,在短短四年内,就有120万栋城市建筑被纳入法律体系。然而,德索托所承诺的那种经济发展却令人失望地缓慢。在1998年和1999年获得土地所有权的20多万利马家庭中,到2002年只有大约四分之一获得了任何形式的贷款。在其他一些尝试过德索托方法的地方,特别是柬埔寨,授予城市土地合法所有权的举措也未能取得预期效果。这些房产只会助长不择手段的开发商和投机者收购——或驱逐——贫困居民的气焰。71

There is no doubt that home ownership has changed people’s attitudes in Quilmes. According to one recent study, those who have acquired property titles have become significantly more individualist and materialist in their attitudes than those who are still squatting. For example, when asked ‘Do you think money is important for happiness?’, the property owners were 34 per cent more likely than the squatters to say that it was.69 Yet there seems to be a flaw in the theory, for owning their homes has not made it significantly easier for people in Quilmes to borrow money. Only 4 per cent have managed to secure a mortgage.70 In de Soto’s native Peru, too, ownership alone doesn’t seem to be enough to resuscitate dead capital. True, after his initial recommendations were accepted by the Peruvian government in 1988, there was a drastic reduction in the time it took to register a property (to just one month) and an even steeper 99 per cent cut in the costs of the transaction. Further efforts were made after the creation of the Commission for the Formalization of Informal Property in 1996 so that, within four years, 1.2 million buildings on urban land had been brought into the legal system. Yet economic progress of the sort de Soto promised has been disappointingly slow. Out of more than 200,000 Lima households awarded land titles in 1998 and 1999, only around a quarter had secured any kind of loans by 2002. In other places where de Soto’s approach has been tried, notably Cambodia, granting legal title to urban properties simply encouraged unscrupulous developers and speculators to buy out – or turf out – poor residents.71

记住:拥有房产并不能给你带来安全感;它只是让你的债权人感到安心。真正的安全感来自于稳定的收入,正如白金汉公爵在19世纪40年代所体会到的,也正如如今底特律的房主们正在体会到的。因此,发展中国家的企业家或许并非都必须通过抵押房产来筹集资金。事实上,拥有房产可能根本就不是积累财富的关键。

Remember: it’s not owning property that gives you security; it just gives your creditors security. Real security comes from having a steady income, as the Duke of Buckingham found out in the 1840s, and as Detroit homeowners are finding out today. For that reason, it may not be necessary for every entrepreneur in the developing world to raise money by mortgaging his house. Or her house. In fact, home ownership may not be the key to wealth generation at all.


在一个下着雨的星期一早晨,我在玻利维亚首都拉巴斯附近的小镇埃尔阿尔托的一个街市上遇到了贝蒂·弗洛雷斯。当时我正要去小额信贷机构“Pro Mujer”在埃尔阿尔托的办公室,但因为海拔高,我感到有些疲惫,于是提议停下来喝杯咖啡。她正忙着煮咖啡,然后把一壶壶浓郁的玻利维亚咖啡分发给市场里的顾客和其他摊主。她的活力和热情立刻吸引了我。与大多数玻利维亚土著妇女截然不同,她似乎毫不拘束地与一个明显的外国人交谈。后来我才知道,她其实是“Pro Mujer”的客户,贷款扩大了她的咖啡摊——这是她的丈夫,一个机械师,无力承担的。而且贷款确实奏效了;我只要看看贝蒂那永不停歇的忙碌就知道了。她有进一步扩张的计划吗?当然有。这份工作帮助她供女儿们上学。

I met Betty Flores on a rainy Monday morning in a street market in El Alto, the Bolivian town next to (or rather above) the capital La Paz. I was on my way to the El Alto offices of the microfinance organization Pro Mujer, but I was feeling tired because of the high altitude and suggested we stop for some coffee. And there she was, busily brewing up and distributing pots and cups of thick, strong Bolivian coffee for shoppers and other stall-keepers throughout the market. I was immediately struck by her energy and vivacity. In marked contrast to the majority of indigenous Bolivian women, she seemed quite uninhibited about talking to an obvious foreigner. It turned out that she was in fact one of Pro Mujer’s clients, having taken out a loan to enlarge her coffee stall – something her husband, a mechanic, had not been able to do. And it had worked; I only had to look at Betty’s perpetual motion to see that. Did she plan any further expansion? Yes indeed. The business was helping her put their daughters through school.

贝蒂·弗洛雷斯并非传统意义上的优质借款人。她积蓄不多,也没有自己的房子。然而,像她这样生活在世界各地贫困国家的成千上万女性,正从像Pro Mujer这样的机构获得贷款,这是旨在释放女性创业潜能的革命性举措的一部分。在玻利维亚等国家,小额信贷运动最伟大的启示在于,女性……事实上,无论是否有房产作为贷款抵押,女性的信用风险都低于男性。这无疑颠覆了人们对挥霍无度的女性购物者的传统印象。事实上,这与几个世纪以来根深蒂固的偏见背道而驰,直到20世纪70年代,人们仍然系统性地认为女性的信用度低于男性。例如,在美国,如果丈夫没有工作,即使已婚女性自己有工作,她们也常常被拒绝贷款。被遗弃或离异的女性处境则更加糟糕。在我成长的年代,信贷仍然是男性的专属领域。然而,小额信贷的发展表明,信用度或许实际上是女性的一项特质。

Betty Flores is not what would conventionally be thought of as a good credit risk. She has modest savings and does not own her own home. Yet she and thousands of women like her in poor countries around the world are being lent money by institutions like Pro Mujer as part of a revolutionary effort to unleash female enterpreneurial energies. The great revelation of the microfinance movement in countries like Bolivia is that women are actually a better credit risk than men, with or without a house as security for their loans. That certainly flies in the face of the conventional image of the spendthrift female shopper. Indeed, it goes against the grain of centuries of prejudice which, until as recently as the 1970s, systematically rated women as less creditworthy than men. In the United States, for example, married women used to be denied credit, even when they were themselves employed, if their husbands were not in work. Deserted and divorced women fared even worse. When I was growing up, credit was still emphatically male. Microfinance, however, suggests that credit-worthiness may in fact be a female trait.

小额信贷运动的创始人、诺贝尔奖得主穆罕默德·尤努斯在研究其祖国孟加拉国的农村贫困问题时,意识到向妇女发放小额贷款的巨大潜力。他于1983年在乔布拉村创立的格莱珉银行(Grameen Bank,意为“乡村银行”),已向近750万借款人发放了小额贷款,其中几乎全部是无抵押的妇女。几乎所有借款人都以五人小组(koota)成员的身份申请贷款,小组每周聚会,非正式地分担还款责任。自成立以来,格莱珉银行已发放超过30亿美元的小额贷款。该银行最初的运营资金来自援助机构,但如今已吸引了足够的存款(截至2007年1月接近6500亿美元),完全实现了自给自足,并且盈利。72 Pro Mujer 由 Lynne Patterson 和 Carmen Velasco 于 1990 年创立,是格莱珉银行在南美众多模仿者中最成功的机构之一。*贷款金额从 200 美元起,期限三个月。大多数女性用这笔钱购买牲畜用于农场,或者像 Betty 一样,用来资助自己的微型企业,销售从玉米饼到特百惠等各种商品。

The founder of the microfinance movement, the Nobel prize winner Muhammad Yunus, came to understand the potential of making small loans to women when studying rural poverty in his native Bangladesh. His mutually owned Grameen (‘Village’) Bank, founded in the village of Jobra in 1983, has made microloans to nearly seven and a half million borrowers, nearly all of them women who have no collateral. Virtually all the borrowers take out their loans as members of a five-member group (koota), which meets on a weekly basis and informally shares responsibility for loan repayments. Since its inception, Grameen Bank has made microloans worth more than $3 billion, initially financing its operations with money from aid agencies, but now attracting sufficient deposits (nearly $650 billion by January 2007) to be entirely self-reliant and, indeed, profitable.72 Pro Mujer, founded in 1990 by Lynne Patterson and Carmen Velasco, is among the most successful of Grameen Bank’s South American imitators.* Loans start at around $200 for three months. Most women use the money to buy livestock for their farms or, like Betty, to fund their own micro-businesses, selling anything from tortillas to Tupperware.

当我依依不舍地离开贝蒂的咖啡摊时,位于埃尔阿尔托的Pro Mujer办公室已经热闹非凡。看到几十位玻利维亚妇女排着队偿还贷款,几乎都穿着传统服饰(每人头戴一顶小巧的圆顶礼帽,帽檐俏皮地别在帽檐上),这景象着实令人印象深刻。她们讲述着各自的经历,我不禁开始思考,或许是时候把那句古老的口号从“安全如房屋”改成“安全如家庭主妇”了。因为我在玻利维亚看到的景象,在世界各地的贫困国家都能找到类似的影子,从内罗毕的贫民窟到印度北方邦的村庄,不一而足。而且,这种情况并非只存在于发展中国家。小额信贷在发达国家的贫困地区也能发挥作用——比如格拉斯哥的卡斯尔米尔克,那里建立了一个由信贷机构组成的网络,称为信用合作社,以此来对抗高利贷(我们在第一章中就遇到过)。在卡斯尔米尔克,贷款的受益者也是当地妇女。在埃尔阿尔托和卡斯尔米尔克,我都听说男人们更倾向于把工资花在酒吧或投注站,而不是费心支付利息。我还反复听到,女人比她们的丈夫更擅长理财。

By the time I tore myself away from Betty’s coffee stall, the Pro Mujer offices in El Alto were already a hive of activity. I found it hard not to be impressed by the sight of dozens of Bolivian women, nearly all in traditional costume (each with a miniature bowler hat, pinned at a jaunty angle), lining up to make their regular loan payments. As they told stories about their experiences, I began wondering if it might just be time to change an age-old catchphrase from ‘As safe as houses’ to ‘As safe as housewives’. For what I saw in Bolivia has its equivalents in poor countries all over the world, from the slums of Nairobi to the villages of Uttar Pradesh in India. And not only in the developing world. Microfinance can also work in enclaves of poverty in the developed world – like Castlemilk, in Glasgow, where a whole network of lending agencies called credit unions has been set up as an antidote to predatory lending by loan sharks (of the sort we encountered in Chapter 1). In Castlemilk, too, the recipients of loans are local women. In both El Alto and Castlemilk I heard how men were much more likely to spend their wages in the pub or the betting shop than to worry about making interest payments. Women, I was told repeatedly, were better at managing money than their husbands.

当然,认为小额信贷是解决全球贫困问题的灵丹妙药是错误的,就像埃尔南多·德·索托的财产权方案一样。世界上大约五分之二的人口实际上被排除在金融体系之外,他们无法获得银行账户,更不用说信贷了。但是,正如尤努斯所说,仅仅给他们贷款并不一定能彻底消除贫困,无论你是否要求抵押品。我们也不应忘记,一些从事小额信贷业务的人是为了赚钱,而不是为了消除贫困。73令人震惊的是,一些小额信贷公司收取的贷款年利率高达80%甚至125%——这简直是高利贷。他们理由是,考虑到管理如此多小额贷款的成本,这是唯一的盈利方式。

Of course, it would be a mistake to assume that microfinance is the holy grail solution to the problem of global poverty, any more than is Hernando de Soto’s property rights prescription. Roughly two fifths of the world’s population is effectively outside the financial system, without access to bank accounts, much less credit. But just giving them loans won’t necessarily consign poverty to the museum, in Yunus’s phrase, whether or not you ask for collateral. Nor should we forget that some people in the microfinance business are in it to make money, not to end poverty.73 It comes as something of a shock to discover that some microfinance firms are charging interest rates as high as 80 or even 125 per cent a year on their loans – rates worthy of loan sharks. The justification is that this is the only way to make money, given the cost of administering so many tiny loans.

自我的苏格兰同胞亚当·斯密于1776年撰写了自由市场理论的奠基之作《国富论》以来,格拉斯哥已经发生了翻天覆地的变化。和底特律一样,它也随着经济的繁荣而崛起。工业时代造就了房地产经济。金融时代对它却不那么友好。但在格拉斯哥,如同在北美、南美和南亚一样,人们正在吸取同样的教训。金融知识匮乏或许普遍存在,但我们似乎都对经济学的一个分支——房地产市场——颇有研究。我们都认为房地产投资稳赚不赔。然而事实并非如此。(2007年第四季度,格拉斯哥的房价下跌了2.1%。唯一令人欣慰的是,爱丁堡的房价下跌了5.8%。)在世界各地的城市,房价飙升,远远超过了租金收入或建筑成本所能支撑的水平。正如经济学家罗伯特·席勒所说,人们普遍认为“房子是绝佳的投资”,这种观念通过与约翰·劳时代以来更常影响股市的反馈机制相同的机制,催生了一个“经典的投机泡沫”。简而言之,当时人们对房地产及其可能带来的资本收益抱有非理性的狂热。74

Glasgow has come a long way since my fellow Scotsman Adam Smith wrote the seminal case for the free market, The Wealth of Nations, in 1776. Like Detroit, it rose on the upswing of the industrial age. The age of finance has been less kind to it. But in Glasgow, as in North and South America, and as in South Asia, people are learning the same lesson. Financial illiteracy may be ubiquitous, but somehow we were all experts on one branch of economics: the property market. We all knew that property was a one-way bet. Except that it wasn’t. (In the last quarter of 2007, Glasgow house prices fell by 2.1 per cent. The only consolation was that in Edinburgh they fell by 5.8 per cent.) In cities all over the world, house prices soared far above what was justified in terms of rental income or construction costs. There was, as the economist Robert Shiller has said, simply a ‘widespread perception that houses are a great investment’, which generated a ‘classic speculative bubble’ via the same feedback mechanism which has more commonly affected stock markets since the days of John Law. In short, there was irrational exuberance about bricks and mortar and the capital gains they could yield.74

正如我们所见,这种看法部分源于政治因素。鼓励住房拥有权虽然有助于为资本主义建立政治支持基础,但也扭曲了资本市场,迫使人们把全部身家都押在房子上。金融理论家警告人们警惕“本土偏好”时,指的是投资者倾向于将资金投入本国生产的资产。但真正的本土偏好是将几乎所有财富都投资于自家房产的倾向。毕竟,住房占美国典型家庭投资组合的三分之二,在其他国家这一比例更高。白金汉郡到玻利维亚,财务安全的关键在于构建一个适当多元化的资产组合。为了实现这一点,我们最好借贷以预期未来的收益。但我们不应被诱使将所有资金都押在风险远非零的房地产市场高杠杆投资上。借贷成本与投资回报之间必须保持可持续的利差,债务与收入之间也必须保持可持续的平衡。

This perception, as we have seen, was partly political in origin. But while encouraging home ownership may help build a political constituency for capitalism, it also distorts the capital market by forcing people to bet the house on, well, the house. When financial theorists warn against ‘home bias’, they mean the tendency for investors to keep their money in assets produced by their own country. But the real home bias is the tendency to invest nearly all our wealth in our own homes. Housing, after all, represents two thirds of the typical US household’s portfolio, and a higher proportion in other countries.75 From Buckinghamshire to Bolivia, the key to financial security should be a properly diversified portfolio of assets.76 To acquire that we are well advised to borrow in anticipation of future earnings. But we should not be lured into staking everything on a highly leveraged play on the far from risk-free property market. There has to be a sustainable spread between borrowing costs and returns on investment, and a sustainable balance between debt and income.

毋庸置疑,这些规则并非仅适用于……这些原则不仅适用于家庭,也适用于国家经济。最后一个亟待解答的问题是:在全球化进程中,世界最大经济体究竟在多大程度上忽视了这些原则?简而言之,一个次贷危机超级大国的代价是什么?

These rules, needless to say, do not apply exclusively to households. They also apply to national economies. The final question that remains to be answered is how far – as a result of the process we have come to call globalization – the biggest economy in the world has been tempted to ignore them. What price, in short, a subprime superpower?

6

6

从帝国到奇美利加

From Empire to Chimerica

仅仅十年前,在1997-1998年的亚洲金融危机期间,人们普遍认为金融危机更容易发生在世界经济的边缘地带——即所谓的新兴市场(以前被称为欠发达国家),例如东亚或拉丁美洲。然而,进入新世纪以来,全球金融体系面临的最大威胁并非来自边缘地带,而是来自核心地带。在硅谷互联网泡沫于2000年8月达到顶峰后的两年里,美国股市下跌了近一半。直到2007年5月,标准普尔500指数的投资者才挽回了损失。然而仅仅三个月后,一场新的金融风暴爆发了,这次是在信贷市场而非股市。正如我们所看到的,这场危机也起源于美国,因为数百万美国家庭发现他们无力偿还数十亿美元的次级抵押贷款。曾几何时,像这样的美国危机足以将全球金融体系拖入衰退,甚至萧条。然而,直到2008年底,亚洲似乎几乎没有受到美国信贷紧缩的影响。事实上,一些分析师,例如高盛全球研究主管吉姆·奥尼尔(Jim O'Neill),认为以蓬勃发展的中国为首的世界其他地区正在与美国经济“脱钩”。

Just ten years ago, during the Asian Crisis of 1997–8, it was conventional wisdom that financial crises were more likely to happen on the periphery of the world economy – in the so-called emerging markets (formerly known as less developed countries) of East Asia or Latin America. Yet the biggest threats to the global financial system in this new century have come not from the periphery but from the core. In the two years after Silicon Valley’s dot-com bubble peaked in August 2000, the US stock market fell by almost half. It was not until May 2007 that investors in the Standard & Poor’s 500 had recouped their losses. Then, just three months later, a new financial storm blew up, this time in the credit market rather than the stock market. As we have seen, this crisis also originated in the United States as millions of American households discovered they could not afford to service billions of dollars’ worth of subprime mortgages. There was a time when American crises like these would have plunged the rest of the global financial system into recession, if not depression. Yet until late 2008 Asia seemed scarcely affected by the credit crunch in the US. Indeed, some analysts like Jim O’Neill, Head of Global Research at Goldman Sachs, argued that the rest of the world, led by booming China, was ‘decoupling’ itself from the American economy.

如果奥尼尔的观点正确,我们正经历着全球金融力量平衡有史以来最惊人的转变之一;一个时代即将终结,这个时代可以追溯到一百多年前。上世纪,世界经济的金融节奏由英语国家主导,先是英国,后是美国。过去三十年,中国经济取得了非凡的增长,人均GDP年均复合增长率高达8.4%。但近年来,这一增长速度似乎有增无减。当奥尼尔及其团队首次对所谓的金砖国家(巴西、俄罗斯、印度和中国,即“快速工业化大国”)的国内生产总值进行预测时,他们设想中国将在2040年左右超越美国。 1 然而,他们最新的预测将这一时间提前到了2027年。 2高盛的经济学家们并没有忽视中国无疑面临的挑战,尤其是共产党政权严苛的独生子女政策埋下的“人口定时炸弹”,以及东亚高速工业革命带来的环境后果。3他们也意识到中国面临的通胀压力,例如2007年股市飙升和2008年食品价格暴涨。然而,总体评估仍然出奇地乐观。这恰恰意味着,在我们有生之年,历史的走向已经发生了改变。

If O’Neill is correct, we are living through one of the most astonishing shifts there has ever been in the global balance of financial power; the end of an era, stretching back more than a century, when the financial tempo of the world economy was set by English-speakers, first in Britain, then in America. The Chinese economy has achieved extraordinary feats of growth in the past thirty years, with per capita GDP increasing at a compound annual growth rate of 8.4 per cent. But in recent times the pace has, if anything, intensified. When O’Neill and his team first calculated projections of gross domestic product for the so-called BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China, or Big Rapidly Industrializing Countries), they envisaged that China could overtake the United States in around 2040.1 Their most recent estimates, however, have brought the date forward to 2027.2 The Goldman Sachs economists do not ignore the challenges that China undoubtedly faces, not least the demographic time bomb planted by the Communist regime’s draconian one-child policy and the environmental consequences of East Asia’s supercharged industrial revolution.3 They are aware, too, of the inflationary pressures in China, exemplified by soaring stock prices in 2007 and surging food prices in 2008. Yet the overall assessment is still strikingly positive. And it implies, quite simply, that history has changed direction in our lifetimes.

三四百年前,东西方的人均收入相差无几。有人声称,北美殖民者的平均生活水平并不比中国普通农民高多少。事实上,在许多方面,明代的中国文明比早期马萨诸塞州的文明更为先进。北京作为几个世纪以来的世界最大城市,其规模远超波士顿,正如郑和在十五世纪初的宝船远胜哥伦布的圣玛利亚号一样。长江三角洲似乎与泰晤士河谷一样,都是孕育重大生产力提升技术创新的热门之地。然而,在1700年至1950年间,东西方的生活水平出现了“巨大分化”。尽管中国在此期间的人均收入绝对值有所下降,但西北地区的社会——尤其是英国及其殖民地——却经历了前所未有的增长。这在很大程度上要归功于工业革命的影响。到1820年,美国人均收入约为中国的两倍;到1870年,接近五倍;到1913年,接近十倍;到1950年,接近二十二倍。1820年至1950年间,美国人均GDP的年均增长率为1.57%,而中国的相应数据为-0.24%。⁵ 1973年中国人均收入最多只有美国人均收入的二十分之一。如果按国际美元和市场汇率计算,差距则更大。即使到了2006年,按此标准计算,中美人均收入之比仍然高达22.9比1。

Three or four hundred years ago there was little to choose between per capita incomes in the West and in the East. The average North American colonist, it has been claimed, had a standard of living not significantly superior to that of the average Chinese peasant cultivator. Indeed, in many ways the Chinese civilization of the Ming era was more sophisticated than that of early Massachusetts. Beijing, for centuries the world’s largest city, dwarfed Boston, just as Admiral Zheng He’s early-fifteenth-century treasure ship had dwarfed Christopher Columbus’s Santa Maria. The Yangtze delta seemed as likely a place as the Thames Valley to produce major productivity-enhancing technological innovations.4 Yet between 1700 and 1950 there was a ‘great divergence’ of living standards between East and West. While China may have suffered an absolute decline in per capita income in that period, the societies of the North West – in particular Britain and its colonial offshoots – experienced unprecedented growth thanks, in large part, to the impact of the industrial revolution. By 1820 per capita income in the United States was roughly twice that of China; by 1870, nearly five times higher; by 1913 nearly ten times; by 1950 nearly twenty-two times. The average annual growth rate of per capita GDP in the United States was 1.57 per cent between 1820 and 1950. The equivalent figure for China was −0.24 per cent.5 In 1973 the average Chinese income was at best one twentieth of the average American. Calculated in terms of international dollars at market exchange rates, the differential was even wider. As recently as 2006, the ratio of US to Chinese per capita income by this measure was still 22.9 to 1.

从18世纪到20世纪70年代,中国究竟出了什么问题?一种观点认为,中国错失了两次对西北地区18世纪腾飞至关重要的宏观经济机遇。第一次是征服美洲,特别是将加勒比海岛屿改造成产糖殖民地,这些“幽灵土地”缓解了欧洲农业体系的压力,否则欧洲农业体系可能会像中国那样面临收益递减的困境。第二次是煤田靠近其他适宜工业发展的地区。除了更便宜的卡路里、木材、羊毛和棉花之外,帝国扩张还带来了其他意想不到的经济效益。它促进了军事技术的发展——钟表、枪支、透镜和航海仪器——而这些技术最终也极大地推动了工业机械的发展。6毋庸置疑,人们提出了许多其他解释来说明东西方之间的巨大差异:地形、资源禀赋、文化、对科学技术的态度,甚至人类进化的差异。7然而,仍然存在一种可信的假设,即中国的问题既源于资源匮乏,也源于财政。一方面,帝国的统一性排除了财政竞争,而财政竞争在文艺复兴时期的欧洲乃至后来的欧洲,都成为了推动金融创新的重要动力。另一方面,帝国能够轻易地通过印钞来弥补财政赤字。这阻碍了欧洲式资本市场的出现。8此外,由于中国对西方的贸易顺差,货币流通也比欧洲更为便捷。简而言之,中国发展商业票据、债券和股票的动力远不如欧洲。当现代金融机构最终在19世纪末进入中国时,它们是作为西方帝国主义的一部分而来的,而且正如我们将看到的,它们始终容易受到爱国主义对外国影响的抵制。9

What went wrong in China between the 1700s and the 1970s? One argument is that China missed out on two major macroeconomic strokes of good luck that were indispensable to the North West’s eighteenth-century take-off. The first was the conquest of the Americas and particularly the conversion of the islands of the Caribbean into sugar-producing colonies, ‘ghost acres’ which relieved the pressure on a European agricultural system that might otherwise have suffered from Chinese-style diminishing returns. The second was the proximity of coalfields to locations otherwise well suited for industrial development. Besides cheaper calories, cheaper wood and cheaper wool and cotton, imperial expansion brought other unintended economic benefits, too. It encouraged the development of militarily useful technologies – clocks, guns, lenses and navigational instruments – that turned out to have big spin-offs for the development of industrial machinery.6 Many other explanations have, needless to say, been offered for the great East–West divergence: differences in topography, resource endowments, culture, attitudes towards science and technology, even differences in human evolution.7 Yet there remains a credible hypothesis that China’s problems were as much financial as they were resource-based. For one thing, the unitary character of the Empire precluded that fiscal competition which proved such a driver of financial innovation in Renaissance Europe and subsequently. For another, the ease with which the Empire could finance its deficits by printing money discouraged the emergence of European-style capital markets.8 Coinage, too, was more readily available than in Europe because of China’s trade surplus with the West. In short, the Middle Kingdom had far fewer incentives to develop commercial bills, bonds and equities. When modern financial institutions finally came to China in the late nineteenth century, they came as part of the package of Western imperialism and, as we shall see, were always vulnerable to patriotic backlashes against foreign influence.9

全球化,即商品、制成品、劳动力和资本的国际市场快速一体化,并非新现象。在1914年之前的三十年里,商品贸易占全球产出的比例几乎与过去三十年一样高。 10在一个边境管制不那么严格的世界里,国际移民相对于世界人口的比例几乎肯定更高;1910年,美国人口中超过14%是外国出生的,而2003年这一比例不到12%。 11 虽然从总额来看,20世纪90年代国际资本存量占全球GDP的比例高于一个世纪前,但从净额来看,海外投​​资——尤其是富裕国家对贫穷国家的投资——在前一个时期要高得多。 12一个多世纪前,欧洲和北美富有进取心的商人就看到了亚洲蕴藏的诱人商机。到19世纪中叶,工业革命的关键技术已经可以转移到任何地方。由于铺设了国际海底电缆网络,通讯延迟已大幅减少。资金充裕,而且正如我们将看到的,英国投资者非常乐意在遥远的国家冒险投资。设备价格低廉,能源充足,劳动力也十分丰富,因此在中国或印度生产纺织品本应是一项利润丰厚的生意。然而,尽管西方投入了超过十亿英镑的资金,维多利亚时代全球化的承诺在亚洲大部分地区却未能实现,留下了至今仍被人们铭记的苦涩记忆。殖民剥削。事实上,20世纪中期对全球化的反弹如此强烈,以至于亚洲人口最多的两个国家从20世纪50年代到70年代基本上与全球市场隔绝开来。

Globalization, in the sense of a rapid integration of international markets for commodities, manufactures, labour and capital, is not a new phenomenon. In the three decades before 1914, trade in goods reached almost as large a proportion of global output as in the past thirty years.10 In a world of less regulated borders, international migration was almost certainly larger relative to world population; more than 14 per cent of the US population was foreign born in 1910 compared with less than 12 per cent in 2003.11 Although, in gross terms, stocks of international capital were larger in relation to global GDP during the 1990s than they were a century ago, in net terms the amounts invested abroad – particularly by rich countries in poor countries – were much larger in the earlier period.12 Over a century ago, enterprising businessmen in Europe and North America could see that there were enticing opportunities throughout Asia. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the key technologies of the industrial revolution could be transferred anywhere. Communication lags had been dramatically reduced thanks to the laying of an international undersea cable network. Capital was abundantly available and, as we shall see, British investors were more than ready to risk their money in remote countries. Equipment was affordable, energy available and labour so abundant that manufacturing textiles in China or India ought to have been a hugely profitable line of business.13 Yet, despite the investment of over a billion pounds of Western funds, the promise of Victorian globalization went largely unfulfilled in most of Asia, leaving a legacy of bitterness towards what is still remembered to this day as colonial exploitation. Indeed, so profound was the mid-century reaction against globalization that the two most populous Asian countries ended up largely cutting themselves off from the global market from the 1950s until the 1970s.

此外,上一轮全球化的结局远非皆大欢喜。恰恰相反,不到一百年前的1914年夏天,它并非悄无声息地结束,而是以震耳欲聋的巨响告终,全球化经济的主要受益者发动了世界历史上最具破坏性的战争。我们自认为已经了解了国际资本在1914年之前为何未能为亚洲带来可持续增长的原因。但是,全球经济一体化的影响与第一次世界大战的爆发之间是否存在某种联系呢?最近有观点认为,这场战争应该被理解为对全球化的一种反弹,其先兆是1914年之前十年间不断上涨的关税和移民限制,而欧洲的农业精英对此最为热切欢迎,因为几十年来,农产品价格下跌和农村剩余劳动力向新大陆的移民削弱了他们的地位。14在欣然接受当今勇敢、崭新且所谓的“后美国”世界之前,15我们必须确保类似的不可预见的反应不会从最新版本的全球化的地缘政治基础中抽走地毯。

Moreover, the last age of globalization had anything but a happy ending. On the contrary, less than a hundred years ago, in the summer of 1914, it ended not with a whimper, but with a deafening bang, as the principal beneficiaries of the globalized economy embarked on the most destructive war the world had ever witnessed. We think we know why international capital failed to produce self-sustaining growth in Asia before 1914. But was there also some connection between the effects of global economic integration and the outbreak of the First World War? It has recently been suggested that the war should be understood as a kind of backlash against globalization, heralded by rising tariffs and immigration restrictions in the decade before 1914, and welcomed most ardently by Europe’s agrarian elites, whose position had been undermined for decades by the decline in agricultural prices and emigration of surplus rural labour to the New World.14 Before blithely embracing today’s brave, new and supposedly ‘post-American’ world,15 we must be sure that similar unforeseen reactions could not pull the geopolitical rug out from under the latest version of globalization.

全球化与世界末日

Globalization and Armageddon

人们过去常说,新兴市场是危机频发之地。投资遥远国家或许能让你一夜暴富,但一旦出现问题,也可能迅速导致破产。正如我们在第二章中看到的,第一次拉丁美洲债务危机早在19世纪20年代就已发生。1890年,阿根廷的另一场新兴市场危机几乎让巴林银行破产,正如105年后,新加坡一位名叫尼克·里森的期货交易员最终导致巴林银行倒闭一样。20世纪80年代的拉丁美洲债务危机……20世纪90年代的亚洲金融危机并非史无前例。金融史表明,如今许多新兴市场更应被称为“再新兴市场”。*如今,中国堪称终极的再新兴市场。像吉姆·罗杰斯这样的亲华投资者认为,在中国赚钱几乎没有上限。 16然而,这并非外国投资者首次涌入中国证券市场,梦想从这个世界上人口最多的国家攫取巨额财富。值得一提的是,上一次他们损失惨重,损失金额之巨,足以让香港著名裁缝一个月缝制出一件衬衫。

It used to be said that emerging markets were the places where they had emergencies. Investing in far-away countries could make you rich but, when things went wrong, it could be a fast track to financial ruin. As we saw in Chapter 2, the first Latin American debt crisis happened as long ago as the 1820s. It was another emerging market crisis, in Argentina, that all but bankrupted the house of Baring in 1890, just as it was a rogue futures trader in Singapore, Nick Leeson, who finally finished Barings off 105 years later. The Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s and the Asian crisis of the 1990s were scarcely unprecedented events. Financial history suggests that many of today’s emerging markets would be better called re-emerging markets.* These days, the ultimate re-emerging market is China. According to Sinophile investors like Jim Rogers, there is almost no limit to the amount of money to be made there.16 Yet this is not the first time that foreign investors have poured money into Chinese securities, dreaming of the vast sums to be made from the world’s most populous country. The last time around, it is worth remembering, they lost as many shirts as Hong Kong’s famous tailors can stitch together in a month.

无论过去还是现在,海外投资的关键问题在于,身处伦敦或纽约的投资者很难了解远隔重洋的外国政府或海外管理者在做什么。此外,直到不久前,大多数非西方国家的法律体系都极不可靠,会计准则也各不相同。如果外国贸易伙伴决定违约,身处地球另一端的投资者几乎无能为力。在全球化初期,解决这一问题的办法简单粗暴却行之有效:推行欧洲的统一规则。

The key problem with overseas investment, then as now, is that it is hard for investors in London or New York to see what a foreign government or an overseas manager is up to when they are an ocean or more away. Moreover, most non-Western countries had, until quite recently, highly unreliable legal systems and differing accounting rules. If a foreign trading partner decided to default on its debts, there was little that an investor situated on the other side of the world could do. In the first era of globalization, the solution to this problem was brutally simple but effective: to impose European rule.

威廉·贾丁和詹姆斯·马西森是两位富有冒险精神的苏格兰人,他们于1832年在中国南方港口城市广州(当时称为坎顿)成立了一家贸易公司。他们的主要业务之一是从印度进口政府生产的鸦片。贾丁曾是东印度公司的外科医生,但他带入中国的鸦片显然并非用于医疗用途。早在1729年,雍正皇帝就已禁止鸦片贸易,因为鸦片成瘾会造成巨大的社会代价。1839年3月10日,道光皇帝下令一位名叫林则徐的官员抵达坎顿,彻底取缔鸦片贸易。林则徐封锁了……他强迫广州的鸦片仓库交出货物,直到英国商人屈服于他的要求。总共约有2万箱鸦片,价值200万英镑,被交出。这些鸦片被掺假使其无法使用,并被直接扔进了大海。17中国人还坚持,今后在中国的英国臣民必须服从中国法律。这完全不符合怡和洋的意愿。这位被中国人称为“铁头老鼠”的人物,在危机期间身处欧洲,急忙赶回伦敦游说英国政府。在与外交大臣帕默斯顿子爵会面三次后,怡和洋似乎……他劝说帕默斯顿,必须展示实力,并指出“敌方战舰力量不足”将确保一支“足够”的英军轻松取胜。1840年2月20日,帕默斯顿下达了命令。到1840年6月,所有海军准备工作均已完成。清朝即将感受到历史上最成功的毒品帝国——大英帝国——的全部威力。

William Jardine and James Matheson were buccaneering Scotsmen who had set up a trading company in the southern Chinese port of Guangzhou (then known as Canton) in 1832. One of their best lines of business was importing government-produced opium from India. Jardine was a former East India Company surgeon, but the opium he was bringing into China was for distinctly non-medicinal purposes. This was a practice that the Emperor Yongzheng had prohibited over a century before, in 1729, because of the high social costs of opium addiction. On 10 March 1839 an imperial official named Lin Zexu arrived in Canton under orders from the Daoguang Emperor to stamp out the trade once and for all. Lin blockaded the Guangzhou opium godowns (warehouses) until the British merchants acceded to his demands. In all, around 20,000 chests of opium valued at £2 million were surrendered. The contents were adulterated to render it unusable and literally thrown in the sea.17 The Chinese also insisted that henceforth British subjects in Chinese territory should submit to Chinese law. This was not to Jardine’s taste at all. Known to the Chinese as ‘Iron-Headed Old Rat’, he was in Europe during the crisis and hastened to London to lobby the British government. After three meetings with the Foreign Secretary, Viscount Palmerston, Jardine seems to have persuaded him that a show of strength was required, and that ‘the want of power of their war junks’ would ensure an easy victory for a ‘sufficient’ British force. On 20 February 1840 Palmerston gave the order. By June 1840 all the naval preparations were complete. The Qing Empire was about to feel the full force of history’s most successful narco-state: the British Empire.

“铁头老老鼠”:怡和集团联合创始人威廉·贾丁

‘Iron-Headed Old Rat’: William Jardine, co-founder of Jardine, Matheson

詹姆斯·马西森,怡和集团在鸦片贸易中的合作伙伴

James Matheson, Jardine’s partner in the opium trade

正如怡和洋所预料的那样,中国当局根本无法与英国海军的力量抗衡。广州被封锁;舟山岛被占领。经过十个月的对峙,英国海军陆战队攻占了珠江口的要塞,珠江口是连接香港和广州的水道。根据1841年1月签署的《春丕条约》(后被皇帝废除),香港成为英国的殖民地。一年后,在另一场一边倒的战斗之后,双方签署了《南京条约》,该条约确认了香港的割让,并允许在五个所谓的通商口岸——广州、厦门——自由进行鸦片贸易。厦门、福州、宁波和上海。根据治外法权原则,英国公民可以在这些城市完全不受中国法律约束地开展业务。

Just as Jardine had predicted, the Chinese authorities were no match for British naval power. Guangzhou was blockaded; Chusan (Zhoushan) Island was captured. After a ten-month stand off, British marines seized the forts that guarded the mouth of the Pearl River, the waterway between Hong Kong and Guangzhou. Under the Convention of Chuenpi, signed in January 1841 (but then repudiated by the Emperor), Hong Kong became a British possession. The Treaty of Nanking, signed a year later after another bout of one-sided fighting, confirmed this cession and also gave free rein to the opium trade in five so-called treaty ports: Canton, Amoy (Xiamen), Foochow (Fuzhou), Ningbo and Shanghai. According to the principle of extraterritoriality, British subjects could operate in these cities with complete immunity from Chinese law.

对中国而言,第一次鸦片战争开启了一段屈辱的时期。鸦片成瘾问题迅速蔓延。基督教传教士动摇了传统的儒家信仰。在太平天国运动的混乱中——这场农民起义推翻了由自称基督弟弟的君主领导的声名狼藉的王朝——两千万至四千万人丧生。然而,对于迅速在香港购置土地并将总部迁至香港岛东岬的怡和洋行而言,维多利亚时代全球化的辉煌时代已经到来。怡和洋行曾在香港岛的最高点之一——怡和瞭望台——驻守一处,监视着从孟买、加尔各答或伦敦驶来的帆船。随着香港作为转口贸易中心的蓬勃发展,鸦片很快便不再是怡和洋行的唯一业务。到 20 世纪初,怡和集团已经拥有了自己的啤酒厂、棉纺厂、保险公司、渡轮公司,甚至还有自己的铁路,包括 1907 年至 1911 年间修建的九龙至广州铁路。

For China, the first Opium War ushered in an era of humiliation. Drug addiction exploded. Christian missionaries destabilized traditional Confucian beliefs. And in the chaos of the Taiping Rebellion – a peasant revolt against a discredited dynasty led by the self-proclaimed younger brother of Christ – between 20 and 40 million people lost their lives. But for Jardine and Matheson, who hastened to acquire land in Hong Kong and soon moved their head office to the island’s East Point, the glory days of Victorian globalization had arrived. Jardine’s Lookout, one of the highest points on Hong Kong island, was where the company used to keep a watchman permanently stationed, to spy the sails of the firm’s clippers as they sailed in from Bombay, Calcutta or London. As Hong Kong flourished as an entrepôt, opium soon ceased to be the company’s sole line of business. By the early 1900s Jardine, Matheson had its own breweries, its own cotton mills, its own insurance company, its own ferry company and even its own railways, including the Kowloon to Canton line, built between 1907 and 1911.

回到伦敦,投资者拥有无数的海外投资机会。NM Rothschild & Sons 的账簿便是最好的例证,它揭示了罗斯柴尔德合伙人在其数百万英镑的投资组合中持有的种类繁多的证券。仅一页账簿就列出了不少于二十种不同的证券,包括智利、埃及、德国、匈牙利、意大利、日本、挪威、西班牙和土耳其政府发行的债券,以及十一家不同铁路公司发行的证券,其中四家位于阿根廷,两家位于加拿大,一家位于中国。18并非只有少数金融精英才能进行这种国际多元化投资。早在1906年,英国投资者只需花费2先令6便士,即可购买亨利·洛温菲尔德的著作《投资:一门精确的科学》,该书推荐了一套“基于地理分布的可靠平均值体系” 。资本被视为“将投资行为中的投机污点降至最低”的手段。 19正如凯恩斯后来在其著作《和平的经济后果》中一段著名的论述中所回忆的那样,一个家境中等的伦敦人几乎无需费力就能“将财富投资于世界任何地区的自然资源和新兴企业,并毫不费力地分享其未来的成果和利益”。 20

Back in London, an investor had myriad foreign investment opportunities open to him. Nothing illustrates this better than the ledgers of N. M. Rothschild & Sons, which reveal the extraordinary array of securities that the Rothschild partners held in their multi-million-pound portfolio. A single page lists no fewer than twenty different securities, including bonds issued by the governments of Chile, Egypt, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Norway, Spain and Turkey, as well as securities issued by eleven different railways, among them four in Argentina, two in Canada and one in China.18 Nor was it only members of the rarefied financial elite who could engage in this kind of international diversification. As early as 1906, for the modest outlay of 2s 6d, British investors could buy Henry Lowenfeld’s book Investment: An Exact Science, which recommended ‘a sound system of averages, based upon the Geographical Distribution of Capital’ as a means of ‘reduc[ing] to a minimum the taint of speculation from the act of investment’.19 As Keynes later recalled, in a justly famous passage in his Economic Consequences of the Peace, it required scarcely any effort for a Londoner of moderate means to ‘adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages’.20

当时,全球约有四十家外国证券交易所,其中七家经常出现在英国财经媒体的报道中。伦敦证券交易所上市了五十七个主权国家和殖民地政府发行的债券。追踪资金从伦敦流向世界其他地区,便能揭示这第一次金融全球化的全貌。英国约45%的投资流向了美国、加拿大和澳大利亚、拉丁美洲,20%流向了拉丁美洲,16%流向了亚洲,13%流向了非洲,6%流向了欧洲其他地区。 21如果将1865年至1914年间英国通过公开发行证券筹集的所有资金加起来,就会发现大部分资金流向了海外;只有不到三分之一的资金投资于英国本土。 22到1913年,全球证券发行总额估计为1580亿美元,其中约450亿美元(28%)为国际持有。 1913年伦敦证券交易所上市的所有证券中,近一半(48%)是外国债券。 23 1913年英国的外国资产总额相当于英国GDP的约150%,年度经常账户盈余高达GDP的9%——这表明当时英国存在如今所谓的储蓄过剩。值得注意的是,1914年以前的资本输出中,流向相对贫穷国家的资金比例远高于近期的情况。1913年,全球25%的外国资本存量投资于人均收入低于美国人均GDP五分之一的国家;而到了1997年,这一比例仅为5%。 24

At that time there were around forty foreign stock exchanges scattered throughout the world, of which seven were regularly covered in the British financial press. The London Stock Exchange listed bonds issued by fifty-seven sovereign and colonial governments. Following the money from London to the rest of the world reveals the full extent of this first financial globalization. Around 45 per cent of British investment went to the United States, Canada and the Antipodes, 20 per cent to Latin America, 16 per cent to Asia, 13 per cent to Africa and 6 per cent to the rest of Europe.21 If you add together all the British capital raised through public issues of securities between 1865 and 1914, you see that the majority went overseas; less than a third was invested in the United Kingdom itself.22 By 1913 an estimated $158 billion in securities were in existence worldwide, of which around $45 billion (28 per cent) were internationally held. Of all the securities quoted on the London Stock Exchange in 1913 nearly half (48 per cent) were foreign bonds.23 Gross foreign assets in 1913 were equivalent to around 150 per cent of UK GDP and the annual current account surplus rose as high as 9 per cent of GDP in 1913 – evidence of what might now be called a British savings glut. Significantly, a much higher proportion of pre-1914 capital export went to relatively poor countries than has been the case more recently. In 1913, 25 per cent of the world’s stock of foreign capital was invested in countries with per capita incomes of a fifth or less of US per capita GDP; in 1997 the proportion was just 5 per cent.24

英国投资者或许仅仅是被资本匮乏地区更高的回报前景所吸引,才涌入海外市场。25或许是金本位制的推广,或是外国政府日益增强的财政责任感促使了这些投资。然而,如果没有英国帝国主义势力的崛起,很难相信在1914年之前会有如此庞大的海外投资。所有这些英国海外投资中,大约有五分之二到一半流向了英国控制的殖民地。相当一部分投资也流向了阿根廷和巴西等英国拥有相当大的非正式影响力的国家。而且,英国的海外投资不成比例地集中在那些能够增强伦敦政治影响力的资产上:不仅包括政府债券,还包括为铁路、港口设施和矿山建设融资而发行的证券。殖民地证券的吸引力之一在于其中一些证券附带的明确担保。26 《殖民地贷款法》(1899年)和《殖民地股票法》(1900年)也赋予了殖民地债券与英国政府基准永久债券——永久债券——相同的受托人地位,使其成为受托储蓄银行的合格投资标的。27但殖民地证券的真正吸引力是隐性的而不是显性的。

It may be that British investors were attracted to foreign markets simply by the prospect of higher returns in capital-poor regions.25 It may be that they were encouraged by the spread of the gold standard, or by the increasing fiscal responsibility of foreign governments. Yet it is hard to believe there would have been so much overseas investment before 1914 had it not been for the rise of British imperial power. Somewhere between two fifths and half of all this British overseas investment went to British-controlled colonies. A substantial proportion also went to countries like Argentina and Brazil over which Britain exercised considerable informal influence. And British foreign investment was disproportionately focused on assets that increased London’s political leverage: not only government bonds but also the securities issued to finance the construction of railways, port facilities and mines. Part of the attraction of colonial securities was the explicit guarantees some of them carried.26 The Colonial Loans Act (1899) and the Colonial Stock Act (1900) also gave colonial bonds the same trustee status as the benchmark British government perpetual bond, the consol, making them eligible investments for Trustee Savings Banks.27 But the real appeal of colonial securities was implicit rather than explicit.

维多利亚时代的人们在其殖民地推行了一套独特的制度,这很可能增强了殖民地对投资者的吸引力。这些制度不仅涵盖了格莱斯顿提出的“健全货币、平衡预算和自由贸易”这三大支柱,还包括法治(特别是英式产权)和相对廉洁的行政管理——这些都是19世纪末自由帝国主义最重要的“公共产品”。与殖民地借款人签订的债务合同,简而言之,比与独立国家签订的合同更容易执行。正如凯恩斯后来指出的那样,“南罗得西亚——一个位于非洲中部,拥有几千白人和不到一百万黑人的地方——可以提供与我们(英国)战争贷款条款相差无几的无担保贷款”,而投资者则可能更倾向于“尼日利亚股票(没有英国政府担保)而不是……伦敦和东北铁路公司的债券”。28英国统治的强加(如同1882年在埃及一样)实际上相当于一种“无违约”保证;唯一投资者面临的不确定性在于英国统治的预期持续时间。1914年以前,尽管在爱尔兰和印度等不同的殖民地,民族主义运动蓬勃发展,但对大多数被统治民族而言,政治独立仍然遥不可及。当时,即使是主要的白人殖民地也只被赋予了有限的政治自治权。而没有哪个殖民地比香港更远离独立。

The Victorians imposed a distinctive set of institutions on their colonies that was very likely to enhance their appeal to investors. These extended beyond the Gladstonian trinity of sound money, balanced budgets and free trade to include the rule of law (specifically, British-style property rights) and relatively noncorrupt administration – among the most important ‘public goods’ of late-nineteenth-century liberal imperialism. Debt contracts with colonial borrowers were, quite simply, more likely to be enforceable than those with independent states. This was why, as Keynes later noted, ‘Southern Rhodesia – a place in the middle of Africa with a few thousand white inhabitants and less than a million black ones – can place an unguaranteed loan on terms not very different from our own [British] War Loan’, while investors could prefer ‘Nigeria stock (which has no British Government guarantee) [to] . . . London and North-Eastern Railway debentures’.28 The imposition of British rule (as in Egypt in 1882) practically amounted to a ‘no default’ guarantee; the only uncertainty investors had to face concerned the expected duration of British rule. Before 1914, despite the growth of nationalist movements in possessions as different as Ireland and India, political independence still seemed a distinctly remote prospect for most subject peoples. At this point even the major colonies of white settlement had been granted only a limited political autonomy. And no colony seemed further removed from gaining its independence than Hong Kong.

1865年至1914年间,英国投资者至少向​​中国证券投入了7400万英镑,这仅占他们到1914年持有的40亿英镑海外资产总额的一小部分,但对于贫困的中国而言,却是一笔巨款。29毫无疑问,这让投资者感到安心:自1854年起,英国不仅将香港作为直辖殖民地统治,还控制了整个中国海关体系,确保中国港口征收的关税至少有一部分用于支付英国债券的利息。然而,即使在所谓的通商口岸的欧洲人聚居区,在飘扬着英国国旗、大班啜饮着金汤力酒的地方,也暗藏着危险。无论英国对香港的控制多么严密,他们都无力阻止中国先后卷入1894-1895年的抗日战争、1900年的义和团运动,以及最终在1911年推翻清朝的辛亥革命——这场革命的部分导火索是中国民众对外国经济过度控制的普遍不满。每一次政治动荡都对外国投资者造成了最沉重的打击:他们的钱包。正如后来的危机——例如1941年的日本入侵,或者1997年的中国接管——香港投资者所持有的中国债券和股票价值大幅缩水。 30早期全球化易受战争和革命冲击的这种脆弱性并非中国独有,而是整个世界金融体系的普遍特征。

Between 1865 and 1914 British investors put at least £74 million into Chinese securities, a tiny proportion of the total £4 billion that they held abroad by 1914, but a significant sum for impoverished China.29 No doubt it reassured investors that, from 1854, Britain not only ruled Hong Kong as a crown colony but also controlled the entire Chinese system of Imperial Maritime Customs, ensuring that at least a portion of the duties collected at China’s ports was earmarked to pay the interest on British-owned bonds. Yet even in the European quarters of the so-called treaty ports, where the Union Jack fluttered and the taipan sipped his gin and tonic, there were dangers. No matter how tightly the British controlled Hong Kong, they could do nothing to prevent China from becoming embroiled first in a war with Japan in 1894–5, then in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and finally in the revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1911 – a revolution partly sparked by widespread Chinese disgust at the extent of foreign domination of their economy. Each of these political upheavals hit foreign investors where it hurts them the most: in their wallets. Much as happened in later crises – the Japanese invasion of 1941 or, for that matter, the Chinese takeover in 1997 – investors in Hong Kong saw steep declines in the value of their Chinese bonds and stocks.30 This vulnerability of early globalization to wars and revolutions was not peculiar to China. It turned out to be true of the entire world financial system.


1914年之前的三十年是国际投资者的黄金时代——名副其实。与外国市场的沟通情况显著改善:到1911年,电报从纽约到伦敦只需30秒,发送成本仅为1866年的0.5%。到1908年,欧洲各国中央银行几乎都已承诺实行金本位制;这意味着它们几乎都必须设定黄金储备目标,一旦出现金银外流,就必须提高利率(或采取其他干预措施)。至少,这简化了投资者的处境,降低了汇率大幅波动的风险。 31 随着19世纪70年代和80年代的通货紧缩逐渐被19世纪90年代中期开始的温和通货膨胀所取代,世界各国政府的财政状况似乎也在改善,这降低了实际债务负担。更高的经济增长也增加了税收收入。 32然而,长期利率仍然很低。尽管1897年至1914年间,英国基准永久债券的收益率上升了一个百分点以上,但这还是从2.25%的历史最低点开始的。我们现在所说的新兴市场利差大幅收窄,尽管19世纪70年代和90年代发生了多起重大债务违约事件。除了希腊和尼加拉瓜这两个挥霍无度的国家发行的证券外,1913年在伦敦交易的所有主权债券和殖民地债券的收益率均未比永久债券高出两个百分点以上,而且大多数债券的收益率远低于永久债券。这意味着,任何在1880年左右购买外国债券组合的人都获得了丰厚的资本收益。 33

The three decades before 1914 were golden years for international investors – literally. Communications with foreign markets dramatically improved: by 1911, a telegraphic message took just thirty seconds to travel from New York to London, and the cost of sending it was a mere 0.5 per cent of the 1866 level. Europe’s central banks had nearly all committed themselves to the gold standard by 1908; that meant that they nearly all had to target their gold reserves, raising rates (or otherwise intervening) if they experienced a specie outflow. At the very least, this simplified life for investors, by reducing the risk of large exchange rate fluctuations.31 Governments around the world also seemed to be improving their fiscal positions as the deflation of the 1870s and 1880s gave way to gentle inflation from the mid-1890s, which reduced debt burdens in real terms. Higher growth also raised tax revenues.32 Long-term interest rates nevertheless remained low. Although the yield on the benchmark British consol rose by over a percentage point between 1897 and 1914, that was from an all-time nadir of 2.25 per cent. What we would now call emerging market spreads narrowed dramatically, despite major episodes of debt default in the 1870s and 1890s. With the exception of securities issued by improvident Greece and Nicaragua, none of the sovereign or colonial bonds that were traded in London in 1913 yielded more than two percentage points above consols, and most paid considerably less. That meant that anyone who had bought a portfolio of foreign bonds in, say, 1880 had enjoyed handsome capital gains.33

其他大国的债券收益率和波动性(约占伦敦报价外国主权债务的一半)在1880年后也持续下降,这表明政治风险溢价也在降低。1880年以前,奥地利、法国、德国和俄罗斯的债券往往会对政治新闻做出剧烈反应;但1914年之前的十年里,各种外交事件和出访,例如摩洛哥和巴尔干半岛事件,几乎没有对伦敦债券市场造成任何震动。尽管1895-1900年卡菲尔(金矿)泡沫破裂后,英国股市基本保持平稳,但收益波动性呈下降趋势。至少有一些证据表明这些趋势之间存在联系。流动性长期上升,部分原因是黄金产量增加,更重要的是金融创新,因为股份制银行的资产负债表相对于其储备金有所扩张,储蓄银行也成功吸引了中下层家庭的存款。34

The yields and volatility of the bonds of the other great powers, which accounted for about half the foreign sovereign debt quoted in London, also declined steadily after 1880, suggesting that political risk premiums were falling, too. Before 1880, Austrian, French, German and Russian bonds had tended to fluctuate quite violently in response to political news; but the various diplomatic alarums and excursions of the decade before 1914, like those over Morocco and the Balkans, caused scarcely a tremor in the London bond market. Although the UK stock market remained fairly flat following the bursting of the 1895–1900 Kaffir (gold mine) bubble, the volatility of returns trended downwards. There is at least some evidence to connect these trends with a long-run rise in liquidity, due partly to increased gold production and, more importantly, to financial innovation, as joint-stock banks expanded their balance sheets relative to their reserves, and savings banks successfully attracted deposits from middle-class and lower-class households.34

所有这些良性的经济趋势都助长了乐观情绪。对许多商人而言——从沙皇俄国的伊万·布洛赫到美国的安德鲁·卡内基——大规模战争对资本主义体系而言将是灾难性的,这一点不言而喻。1898年,布洛赫出版了一部六卷本的巨著《未来的战争》,书中论证道,由于武器破坏力的技术进步,战争本质上已经没有未来。任何大规模战争的尝试都将以“国家的破产”告终。 35 1910年,就在卡内基创立国际和平基金会的同一年,左倾的英国记者诺曼·安吉尔出版了《大幻觉》,书中他认为,大国之间的战争之所以在经济上变得不可能,恰恰是因为“我们以信贷为基础的金融体系的微妙相互依存性”。36 1914年春,一个国际委员会发表了关于1912-1913年巴尔干战争期间暴行的报告。尽管他和他的同事们面对着大量证据表明,战争是在整个民族之间进行的但委员会主席在引言中指出,欧洲列强(与巴尔干小国不同)“已经发现了一个显而易见的真理:最富有的国家在战争中损失最大,而每个国家都渴望和平胜过一切”。委员会的英国成员之一,亨利·诺埃尔·布雷斯福德——他是独立工党的坚定支持者,也是对军火工业进行猛烈抨击的著作《钢铁与黄金之战》的作者——宣称:

All these benign economic trends encouraged optimism. To many businessmen – from Ivan Bloch in Tsarist Russia to Andrew Carnegie in the United States – it was self-evident that a major war would be catastrophic for the capitalist system. In 1898 Bloch published a massive six-volume work entitled The War of the Future which argued that, because of technological advances in the destructiveness of weaponry, war essentially had no future. Any attempt to wage it on a large scale would end in ‘the bankruptcy of nations’.35 In 1910, the same year that Carnegie established his Endowment for International Peace, the left-leaning British journalist Norman Angell published The Great Illusion, in which he argued that a war between the great powers had become an economic impossibility precisely because of ‘the delicate interdependence of our credit-built finance’.36 In the spring of 1914 an international commission published its report into the outrages committed during the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. Despite the evidence he and his colleagues confronted of wars waged à l’outrance between entire populations, the commission’s chairman noted in his introduction that the great powers of Europe (unlike the petty Balkan states) ‘had discovered the obvious truth that the richest country has the most to lose by war, and each country wishes for peace above all things’. One of the British members of the commission, Henry Noel Brailsford – a staunch supporter of the Independent Labour Party and author of a fierce critique of the arms industry (The War of Steel and Gold) – declared:

在欧洲,征服的时代已经结束,除了巴尔干半岛以及奥匈帝国和俄罗斯帝国的边缘地带之外,可以肯定的是,我们民族国家的边界​​最终……画出来了。我个人认为,六大强国之间不会再有战争了。37

In Europe the epoch of conquest is over and save in the Balkans and perhaps on the fringes of the Austrian and Russian empires, it is as certain as anything in politics that the frontiers of our national states are finally drawn. My own belief is that there will be no more wars among the six great powers.37

1914年6月28日,奥地利皇位继承人弗朗茨·斐迪南大公在波斯尼亚首都萨拉热窝被加夫里洛·普林西普刺杀,金融市场最初并未对此做出反应。直到7月22日,财经媒体才开始对巴尔干危机可能升级为更大、更具经济威胁的危机表示担忧。然而,当投资者最终意识到欧洲全面战争的可能性时,全球经济的流动性如同浴缸底部突然消失一般被抽走。危机的第一个征兆是,在奥地利向塞尔维亚发出最后通牒后,航运保险费上涨(奥地利的最后通牒要求塞尔维亚允许奥地利官员进入塞尔维亚,以寻找贝尔格莱德参与刺杀的证据)。随着谨慎的投资者寻求通过持有现金来增加其头寸的流动性,债券和股票价格开始下跌。欧洲投资者尤其迅速地开始抛售其持有的俄罗斯证券,随后是美国投资者。由于跨境债权人试图将资金汇回本国,汇率剧烈波动:英镑和法郎飙升,而卢布和美元暴跌。38到7月30日,恐慌情绪席卷了大多数金融市场。 39,40 伦敦首当其冲的是证券交易所的所谓“交易商”,他们严重依赖借贷资金来购买股票。随着卖单涌入,他们的股票价值暴跌至低于债务价值,迫使其中一些公司(尤其是德伦伯格公司)破产。同样面临压力的还有伦敦的商业票据经纪人,他们中的许多人被欧洲大陆的交易对手拖欠巨额款项,而这些交易对手现在无力或不愿汇款。他们的困境反过来又影响了承兑行(精英商业银行),因为承兑行承兑了票据,如果外国债权人违约,他们将首当其冲。如果承兑行倒闭,票据经纪人也会随之破产,甚至可能连大型股份制银行也会受到影响。每天有数百万英镑短期借入贴现市场。股份制银行收回贷款的决定加剧了我们现在所说的信贷紧缩。随着人们争相出售资产以增加流动性,股价下跌,导致以股票作抵押借款的经纪人和其他借款人蒙受损失。国内消费者开始担心银行业危机。人们在英格兰银行排队兑换金币。伦敦作为国际信贷中心的作用实际上被削弱,这加速了危机从欧洲蔓延到世界其他地区的进程。

Financial markets had initially shrugged off the assassination by Gavrilo Princip of the heir to the Austrian throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. Not until 22 July did the financial press express any serious anxiety that the Balkan crisis might escalate into something bigger and more economically threatening. When investors belatedly grasped the likelihood of a full-scale European war, however, liquidity was sucked out of the world economy as if the bottom had dropped out of a bath. The first symptom of the crisis was a rise in shipping insurance premiums in the wake of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia (which demanded, among other things, that Austrian officials be allowed into Serbia to seek evidence of Belgrade’s complicity in the assassination). Bond and stock prices began to slip as prudent investors sought to increase the liquidity of their positions by shifting into cash. European investors were especially quick to start selling their Russian securities, followed by Americans. Exchange rates went haywire as a result of efforts by cross-border creditors to repatriate their money: sterling and the franc surged, while the ruble and dollar slumped.38 By 30 July panic reigned on most financial markets.39,40 The first firms to come under pressure in London were the so-called jobbers on the Stock Exchange, who relied heavily on borrowed money to finance their purchases of equities. As sell orders flooded in, the value of their stocks plunged below the value of their debts, forcing a number (notably Derenberg & Co.) into bankruptcy. Also under pressure were the commercial bill brokers in London, many of whom were owed substantial sums by continental counterparties now unable or unwilling to remit funds. Their difficulties in turn impacted on the acceptance houses (the elite merchant banks), who were first in line if the foreigners defaulted, since they had accepted the bills. If the acceptance houses went bust, the bill brokers would go down with them, and possibly also the larger joint-stock banks, which lent millions every day short-term to the discount market. The joint-stock banks’ decision to call in loans deepened what we would now call the credit crunch. As everyone scrambled to sell assets and increase their liquidity, stock prices fell, compromising brokers and others who had borrowed money using shares as collateral. Domestic customers began to fear a banking crisis. Queues formed as people sought to exchange banknotes for gold coins at the Bank of England.41 The effective suspension of London’s role as the hub of international credit helped spread the crisis from Europe to the rest of the world.

1914年危机最引人注目的特点或许是世界主要股票市场长达五个月的关闭。维也纳股市率先关闭(7月27日)。到7月30日,欧洲大陆所有交易所都已关门。第二天,伦敦和纽约也被迫效仿。尽管11月18日的结算日顺利进行,但伦敦证券交易所直到1915年1月4日才重新开市。自1773年成立以来,从未发生过如此大规模的交易。 42纽约股市于11月28日有限度地重新开放(仅允许债券现金交易),但直到1915年4月1日才完全恢复正常交易。 43危机期间关闭的并非只有证券交易所。大多数美国商品市场以及大多数欧洲外汇市场也被迫暂停交易。例如,伦敦皇家交易所一直关闭到9月17日。44看来,如果市场没有关闭,价格暴跌的程度很可能与1929年一样极端,甚至更糟。没有任何国家支持的恐怖主义行为造成的经济后果能比得上1914年加夫里洛·普林西普的恐怖袭击。

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the crisis of 1914 was the closure of the world’s major stock markets for periods of up to five months. The Vienna market was the first to close (on 27 July). By 30 July all the continental European exchanges had shut their doors. The next day London and New York felt compelled to follow suit. Although a belated settlement day went ahead smoothly on 18 November, the London Stock Exchange did not reopen until 4 January 1915. Nothing like this had happened since its foundation in 1773.42 The New York market reopened for limited trading (bonds for cash only) on 28 November, but wholly unrestricted trading did not resume until 1 April 1915.43 Nor were stock exchanges the only markets to close in the crisis. Most US commodity markets had to suspend trading, as did most European foreign exchange markets. The London Royal Exchange, for example, remained shut until 17 September.44 It seems likely that, had the markets not closed, the collapse in prices would have been as extreme as in 1929, if not worse. No act of state-sponsored terrorism has had greater financial consequences than Gavrilo Princip’s in 1914.

金本位制的近乎普遍采用一度被视为投资者的福音。然而,在1914年的危机中,它却加剧了流动性危机。一些中央银行(尤其是英格兰银行)在危机初期甚至提高了贴现率,试图阻止外国投资者将资金汇回国内,从而减少黄金储备,但最终徒劳无功。当时的黄金储备是否充足,取决于……战前,关于紧急情况的应对措施曾引发激烈辩论;事实上,这些辩论几乎是金融界曾考虑过即将到来的麻烦的唯一证据。 45然而,金本位制并不比今天亚洲和中东的非正式美元挂钩制度更具约束力;在战争紧急情况下,许多国家,首先是俄罗斯,直接暂停了其货币与黄金的兑换。在英国和美国,正式的兑换制度得以维持,但如果认为有必要,也可以暂停。(英格兰银行获准暂停执行1844年《银行法》,该法案规定了银行储备与纸币发行之间的固定比例,但这并不等同于暂停金银支付,因为即使储备较低,金银支付也很容易维持。)在每种情况下,危机都促使发行了紧急纸币:在英国,发行了1英镑和10先令的国库券;在美国,银行根据 1908 年的《奥尔德里奇-弗里兰法案》被授权发行紧急货币。46当时,正如现在一样,当局通过印钞来应对流动性危机。

The near-universal adoption of the gold standard had once been seen as a comfort to investors. In the crisis of 1914, however, it tended to exacerbate the liquidity crisis. Some central banks (notably the Bank of England) actually raised their discount rates in the initial phase of the crisis, in a vain attempt to deter foreigners from repatriating their capital and thereby draining gold reserves. The adequacy of gold reserves in the event of an emergency had been hotly debated before the war; indeed, these debates are almost the only evidence that the financial world had given any thought whatever to the trouble that lay ahead.45 Yet the gold standard was no more rigidly binding than today’s informal dollar pegs in Asia and the Middle East; in the emergency of war, a number of countries, beginning with Russia, simply suspended the gold convertibility of their currencies. In both Britain and the United States formal convertibility was maintained, but it could have been suspended if that had been thought necessary. (The Bank of England was granted suspension of the 1844 Bank Act, which imposed a fixed relationship between the Bank’s reserve and note issue, but this was not equivalent to suspending specie payments, which could easily be maintained with a lower reserve.) In each case, the crisis prompted the issue of emergency paper money: in Britain, £1 and 10s Treasury notes; in the United States, the emergency currency that banks were authorized to issue under the Aldrich-Vreeland Act of 1908.46 Then, as now, the authorities reacted to a liquidity crisis by printing money.

这些措施并非唯一必要的措施。在伦敦,8月3日星期一的银行假日延长至8月6日星期四。汇票的到期付款经皇家公告推迟一个月。除工资、税款、养老金等以外,所有其他到期款项的支付均被紧急写入法律,为期一个月。(这些延期付款的期限后来分别延长至10月19日和11月4日。)8月13日,财政大臣向英格兰银行保证,如果该行对所有在8月4日(宣战日)之前承兑的已批准汇票进行贴现,“且不追究持票人的责任”,那么财政部将承担该行可能遭受的任何损失。这相当于政府对贴现行的救助;由于大量汇票涌入银行进行贴现,这为货币基础的大规模扩张打开了大门。9月5日,政府也向承兑行提供了援助。47各国的安排各不相同,但权宜之计是这些措施大体相似,但规模却前所未有:暂时关闭市场;暂停偿还债务;政府发行紧急货币;救助最脆弱的机构。在所有这些方面,当局准备采取的措施远超以往应对纯粹金融危机时的力度。正如一个多世纪前那场“世界大战”(对抗革命时期的法国和拿破仑统治下的法国)期间发生的那样,1914年的战争被视为一种特殊的紧急状态,因此有必要采取在和平时期难以想象的措施,包括(正如一位保守党贵族所言)“免除银行家的一切责任”。 48

Nor were these the only measures deemed necessary. In London the bank holiday of Monday 3 August was extended until Thursday the 6th. Payments due on bills of exchange were postponed for a month by royal proclamation. A month-long moratorium on all other payments due (except wages, taxes, pensions and the like) was rushed onto the statute books. (These moratoria were later extended until, respectively, 19 October and 4 November.) On 13 August the Chancellor of the Exchequer gave the Bank of England a guarantee that, if the Bank discounted all approved bills accepted before 4 August (when war was declared) ‘without recourse against the holders’, then the Treasury would bear the cost of any loss the Bank might incur. This amounted to a government rescue of the discount houses; it opened the door for a massive expansion of the monetary base, as bills poured into the Bank to be discounted. On 5 September assistance was also extended to the acceptance houses.47 Arrangements varied from country to country, but the expedients were broadly similar and quite unprecedented in their scope: temporary closures of markets; moratoria on debts; emergency money issued by governments; bailouts for the most vulnerable institutions. In all these respects, the authorities were prepared to go much further than they had previously gone in purely financial crises. As had happened during the previous ‘world war’ (against revolutionary and then Napoleonic France more than a century before), the war of 1914 was understood to be a special kind of emergency, justifying measures that would have been inconceivable in peacetime, including (as one Conservative peer put it) ‘the release of the bankers . . . from all liability’.48

股市关闭以及当局出手注入流动性,几乎肯定避免了一场灾难性的资产抛售。在交易暂停时,伦敦股市同比已下跌7%,而这还是在战乱爆发之前。关于债券交易的零星数据(在股市关闭期间,债券交易实际上是在街头进行的)让我们得以窥见,尽管当局做出了努力,投资者仍然不得不面对巨大的损失。到1914年底,俄国债券下跌了8.8%,英国永久债券下跌了13.2%,法国地租债券下跌了13.2%,奥地利债券下跌了23%。 49用巴林银行的帕特里克·肖-斯图尔特的话来说,这是“自金融诞生以来,伦敦所面临的最可怕的事情之一”。 50 然而,这仅仅是开始。与“战争短暂”的幻想(这种幻想在金融界比在军事界更为普遍)相反,接下来还有四年的惨烈战争,以及更长时间的金融损失。任何不明智或出于爱国情怀而持有金边债券(永久债券或新发行的英国战争贷款)的投资者,到1920年都将遭受经通胀调整后高达46%的损失。即使是英国股票的实际收益也是负的(-27%)。法国的通货膨胀和德国的恶性通货膨胀对那些鲁莽地持有大量法郎或马克的人造成了更为严重的打击。到1923年,所有德国证券的持有者都损失殆尽,尽管随后的重估立法恢复了他们部分原有的资产。资本。持有大量奥地利、匈牙利、奥斯曼和俄罗斯债券的人也遭受了惨重损失——即便这些债券是以黄金计价的——因为哈布斯堡王朝、奥斯曼帝国和罗曼诺夫王朝在全面战争的压力下分崩离析。俄罗斯债券的损失尤其突然和严重,布尔什维克政权于1918年2月违约。到那时,1906年发行的俄罗斯5%债券的交易价格已跌至面值的45%以下。在整个20世纪20年代,人们仍然抱有与外国债权人达成某种和解的希望,到那时,这些债券的交易价格约为面值的20%。到了20世纪30年代,它们几乎一文不值。52

The closure of the stock market and the intervention of the authorities to supply liquidity almost certainly averted a catastrophic fire-sale of assets. The London stock market was already down 7 per cent on the year when trading was suspended, and that was before the fighting had even begun. Fragmentary data on bond transactions (conducted literally in the street during the period of stock market closure) give a sense of the losses investors had to contemplate, despite the authorities’ efforts. By the end of 1914, Russian bonds were down 8.8 per cent, British consols per cent, French rentes 13.2 per cent and Austrian bonds 23 per cent.49 In the words of Patrick Shaw-Stewart of Barings, it was ‘one of the most terrific things London had been up against since finance existed’.50 This, however, was merely the beginning. Contrary to the ‘short war’ illusion (which was more widespread in financial than in military circles), there were another four years of carnage still to go, and an even longer period of financial losses. Any investor unwise or patriotic enough to hang on to gilt-edged securities (consols or the new UK War Loans) would have suffered inflation-adjusted losses of −46 per cent by 1920. Even the real returns on British equities were negative (−27 per cent).51 Inflation in France and hyperinflation in Germany inflicted even more severe punishment on anyone rash enough to maintain large franc or mark balances. By 1923 holders of all kinds of German securities had lost everything, though subsequent revaluation legislation restored some of their original capital. Those with substantial holdings of Austrian, Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian bonds also lost heavily – even when these were gold-denominated – as the Habsburg, Ottoman and Romanov empires fell apart under the stresses of total war. The losses were especially sudden and severe in the case of Russian bonds, on which the Bolshevik regime defaulted in February 1918. By the time this happened, Russian 5 per cent bonds of the 1906 vintage were trading at below 45 per cent of their face value. Hopes of some kind of settlement with foreign creditors lingered on throughout the 1920s, by which time the bonds were trading at around 20 per cent of par. By the 1930s they were all but worthless.52

尽管银行家们竭尽全力,不遗余力地为诸如支付德国赔款这样前景黯淡的用途发放贷款,但事实证明,恢复两次世界大战之间自由资本流动的旧秩序已不可能。货币危机、违约、关于赔款和战争债务的争论,以及随后的大萧条,导致越来越多的国家实施外汇和资本管制,以及保护主义关税和其他贸易限制,徒劳地试图以牺牲国际交流为代价来维护国家财富。例如,1921年10月19日,中国政府宣布破产,并开始拖欠几乎所有外债。从上海到圣地亚哥,从莫斯科到墨西哥城,这样的故事在世界各地不断上演。到20世纪30年代末,世界上大多数国家,包括那些保留政治自由的国家,都已将贸易、移民和投资限制视为理所当然。一些国家实现了近乎完全的经济自给自足(自给自足),这是去全球化社会的理想状态。无论是有意还是无意,所有政府在和平时期都继续实施了1914年至1918年间首次实施的经济限制措施。

Despite the best efforts of the bankers, who indefatigably floated loans for such unpromising purposes as the payment of German reparations, it proved impossible to restore the old order of free capital mobility between the wars. Currency crises, defaults, arguments about reparations and war debts and then the onset of the Depression led more and more countries to impose exchange and capital controls as well as protectionist tariffs and other trade restrictions, in a vain bid to preserve national wealth at the expense of international exchange. On 19 October 1921, for example, the Chinese government declared bankruptcy, and proceeded to default on nearly all China’s external debts. It was a story repeated all over the world, from Shanghai to Santiago, from Moscow to Mexico City. By the end of the 1930s, most states in the world, including those that retained political freedoms, had imposed restrictions on trade, migration and investment as a matter of course. Some achieved near-total economic self-sufficiency (autarky), the ideal of a de-globalized society. Consciously or unconsciously, all governments applied in peacetime the economic restrictions that had first been imposed between 1914 and 1918.


第一次世界大战的起源在战争爆发之初就变得清晰可见。直到那时,布尔什维克领导人才意识到这一点。列宁认识到战争是帝国主义竞争的必然结果。直到那时,美国自由主义者才意识到秘密外交和错综复杂的欧洲联盟才是冲突的主要原因。英国和法国自然指责德国;德国则指责英国和法国。九十多年来,历史学家一直在完善和修正这些论点。一些人将战争的起源追溯到19世纪90年代中期的海军竞赛;另一些人则追溯到1907年后的巴尔干半岛事件。那么,既然如今战争的起因如此众多且显而易见,为什么当时的人们对世界末日直到爆发前几天才有所察觉呢?一个可能的答案是,充裕的流动性和时间的流逝模糊了他们的视线。全球一体化和金融创新使世界在投资者眼中显得安全可靠。此外,距离上次欧洲大规模战争——法德战争——已经过去了44年,而那场战争幸运地短暂。当然,从地缘政治角度来看,世界远非安全之地。任何《每日邮报》的读者都能看出,欧洲的军备竞赛和帝国主义的争夺终有一天会演变成一场大战;事实上,当时甚至出现了一整类以虚构的英德战争为主题的通俗小说。然而,直到毁灭的前夜,金融市场的指示灯依然闪烁着绿灯,而非红灯。

The origins of the First World War became clearly visible – as soon as it had broken out. Only then did the Bolshevik leader Lenin see that war was an inevitable consequence of imperialist rivalries. Only then did American liberals grasp that secret diplomacy and the tangle of European alliances were the principal causes of conflict. The British and French naturally blamed the Germans; the Germans blamed the British and French. Historians have been refining and modifying these arguments for more than ninety years now. Some have traced the origins of the war back to the naval race of the mid-1890s; others to events in the Balkans after 1907. So why, when its causes today seem so numerous and so obvious, were contemporaries so oblivious of Armageddon until just days before its advent? One possible answer is that their vision was blurred by a mixture of abundant liquidity and the passage of time. The combination of global integration and financial innovation had made the world seem reassuringly safe to investors. Moreover, it had been forty-four years since the last major European war, between France and Germany, and that had been mercifully short. Geopolitically, of course, the world was anything but a safe place. Any reader of the Daily Mail could see that the European arms race and imperial rivalry might one day lead to a major war; indeed, there was an entire subgenre of popular fiction based on imaginary Anglo-German wars. Yet the lights in financial markets were flashing green, not red, until the very eve of destruction.

或许,这其中也蕴含着对我们这个时代的启示。第一代金融全球化至少用了一代人的时间才得以实现,却在短短几天内就被摧毁殆尽。而要修复1914年8月战争造成的破坏,则需要两代人以上的时间。

There may be a lesson here for our time, too. The first era of financial globalization took at least a generation to achieve. But it was blown apart in a matter of days. And it would take more than two generations to repair the damage done by the guns of August 1914.

经济杀手

Economic Hit Men

从20世纪30年代到60年代末,国际金融和全球化理念沉寂了一段时间——有些人甚至认为它已经消亡。53正如美国经济学家阿瑟·布卢姆菲尔德在1946年所写的那样:

From the 1930s until the late 1960s, international finance and the idea of globalization slumbered – some even considered it dead.53 In the words of the American economist Arthur Bloomfield, writing in 1946:

如今,无论是在学术界还是银行界,普遍认为对私人资本流动,特别是所谓的“热钱”流动进行相当程度的直接控制,不仅对大多数国家在未来几年内,而且从长远来看,都是可取的……这种理论上的转变反映了人们对这些流动在两次世界大战期间的破坏性行为普遍感到失望。54

It is now highly respectable doctrine, in academic and banking circles alike, that a substantial measure of direct control over private capital movements, especially of the so-called hot money varieties, will be desirable for most countries not only in the years immediately ahead but also in the long run as well . . . This doctrinal volte-face represents a widespread disillusionment resulting from the destructive behaviour of these movements in the interwar years.54

1944年7月,即将战胜的盟军在新罕布什尔州白山的布雷顿森林举行会议,旨在为战后世界构建新的金融体系。在这个新秩序下,贸易将逐步自由化,但资本流动限制依然存在。汇率将像金本位制下一样固定,但如今的锚点——国际储备货币——将是美元而非黄金(尽管美元本身在名义上仍然可以兑换成黄金,但大量的黄金仍然存放在诺克斯堡,虽然无法流动,却具有象征意义)。正如布雷顿森林体系的主要设计者之一凯恩斯所言,“控制资本流动”将成为“战后体系的永久特征”。 55如果各国政府认为无法实现本国货币的自由兑换,甚至连游客出国旅行都将被限制携带超过口袋里少量现金。当资金跨越国界流动时,它们会像马歇尔援助*那样,在各国政府之间流转,帮助重建了1948年至1952年间遭受重创的西欧。56这一新秩序的两位守护“姐妹”将是在“自由世界”之都华盛顿特区,国际货币基金组织和国际复兴开发银行(后与国际开发协会合并,更名为世界银行)相继成立。正如现任世界银行行长罗伯特·佐利克所言:“国际货币基金组织原本旨在调节汇率。而后来的世界银行则旨在帮助战后国家重建。自由贸易将会复兴。但资本自由流动却被搁置了。” 因此,在接下来的四分之一世纪里,各国政府都在努力解决所谓的“三难困境”,即一个国家只能从三个政策选项中选择两个:

At Bretton Woods, in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the soon-to-be-victorious Allies met in July 1944 to devise a new financial architecture for the post-war world. In this new order, trade would be progressively liberalized, but restrictions on capital movements would remain in place. Exchange rates would be fixed, as under the gold standard, but now the anchor – the international reserve currency – would be the dollar rather than gold (though the dollar itself would notionally remain convertible into gold, vast quantities of which sat, immobile but totemic, in Fort Knox). In the words of Keynes, one of the key architects of the Bretton Woods system, ‘control of capital movements’ would be ‘a permanent feature of the post-war system’.55 Even tourists could be prevented from going abroad with more than a pocketful of currency if governments felt unable to make their currencies convertible. When capital sums did flow across national borders, they would go from government to government, like the Marshall Aid* that helped revive devastated Western Europe between 1948 and 1952.56 The two guardian ‘sisters’ of this new order were to be established in Washington, DC, the capital of the ‘free world’: the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, later (in combination with the International Development Association) known as the World Bank. In the words of current World Bank President Robert Zoellick, ‘The IMF was supposed to regulate exchange rates. What became the World Bank was supposed to help rebuild countries shattered by the war. Free trade would be revived. But free capital flows were out.’ Thus, for the next quarter century, did governments resolve the so-called ‘trilemma’, according to which a country can choose any two out of three policy options:

  1. 跨境资本流动完全自由;

  2. full freedom of cross-border capital movements;

  3. 固定汇率;

  4. a fixed exchange rate;

  5. 一项独立于国内目标的货币政策。57

  6. an independent monetary policy oriented towards domestic objectives.57

在布雷顿森林体系下,西方国家选择了方案2和方案3。事实上,随着时间的推移,资本管制的趋势是不放松反而收紧。一个很好的例子是美国于1963年通过的《利息平等法》,该法案的明确目的就是为了阻止美国人投资外国证券。

Under Bretton Woods, the countries of the Western world opted for 2 and 3. Indeed, the trend was for capital controls to be tightened rather than loosened as time went on. A good example is the Interest Equalization Act passed by the United States in 1963, which was expressly designed to discourage Americans from investing in foreign securities.

然而,布雷顿森林体系始终存在不可持续的缺陷。对于所谓的第三世界国家而言,通过政府间援助项目复制马歇尔计划的各种尝试最终都令人大失所望。随着时间的推移,尤其是美国的援助,附加了诸多政治和军事条件,而这些条件并非总是符合受援国的最佳利益。即便情况并非如此,像沃尔特·罗斯托*这样的美国经济学家所设想的那种资本注入,是否真的能够解决这些问题,也令人怀疑。大多数非洲、亚洲和拉丁美洲经济体都面临着同样的问题。大量援助资金拨给了贫困国家,但其中大部分要么被浪费,要么被盗。58布雷顿森林体系虽然通过加速西欧的复苏创造了新的财富,但却令那些意识到过度偏袒本国市场风险的投资者感到沮丧。而且,由于它允许各国将货币政策置于充分就业目标之下,甚至在三难困境的第二种和第三种选择之间也产生了潜在的冲突。20世纪60年代末,美国公共部门的赤字按今天的标准来看微不足道,但足以引起法国的抱怨,他们认为华盛顿正在利用其储备货币地位,通过印钞向美国的外国债权人收取铸币税,就像中世纪的君主利用其铸币垄断权来贬值货币一样。 1971年,尼克松政府决定切断美元与金本位制的最后联系(即终止美元与黄金的兑换),这标志着布雷顿森林体系的终结。 59 1973年,阿以战争和阿拉伯石油禁运爆发后,大多数中央银行倾向于通过宽松的信贷政策来应对价格冲击,这恰恰导致了戴高乐将军的顾问雅克·吕夫所担忧的通货膨胀危机。 60

Yet there was always an unsustainable quality to the Bretton Woods system. For the so-called Third World, the various attempts to replicate the Marshall Plan through government-to-government aid programmes proved deeply disappointing. Over time, American aid in particular became hedged around with political and military conditions that were not always in the best interests of the recipients. Even if that had not been the case, it is doubtful that capital injections of the sort envisaged by American economists like Walt Rostow* were the solution to the problems of most African, Asian and Latin American economies. Much aid was disbursed to poor countries, but the greater part of it was either wasted or stolen.58 In so far as Bretton Woods did succeed in generating new wealth by expediting the recovery of Western Europe, it could only frustrate those investors who saw the risk in excessive home bias. And, in so far as it allowed countries to subordinate monetary policy to the goal of full employment, it created potential conflicts even between options 2 and 3 of the trilemma. In the late 1960s, US public sector deficits were negligible by today’s standards, but large enough to prompt complaints from France that Washington was exploiting its reserve currency status in order to collect seigniorage from America’s foreign creditors by printing dollars, much as medieval monarchs had exploited their monopoly on minting to debase the currency. The decision of the Nixon administration to sever the final link with the gold standard (by ending gold convertibility of the dollar) sounded the death knell for Bretton Woods in 1971.59 When the Arab-Israeli War and the Arab oil embargo struck in 1973, most central banks tended to accommodate the price shock with easier credit, leading to precisely the inflationary crisis that General de Gaulle’s adviser Jacques Rueff had feared.60

随着货币再次实行浮动汇率制,以及欧洲债券市场等离岸市场蓬勃发展,20世纪70年代非政府资本输出再次兴起。尤其值得一提的是,西方银行争相将石油出口国迅速增长的盈余资金重新投入市场。银行家们选择向中东石油美元放贷的地区,正是他们一直以来的宠儿。1975年至1982年间,拉丁美洲的外国借款额增长了四倍,从750亿美元增至超过3150亿美元。(东欧国家也纷纷进入资本债务市场,这无疑是共产主义阵营即将走向衰落的征兆。)1982年8月,墨西哥宣布无力偿还债务。整个美洲大陆都摇摇欲坠,濒临破产。然而,投资者再也不能指望本国政府在外国政府行为不端时派出炮舰了。如今,金融监管的角色不得不由两个手无寸铁的银行家——国际货币基金组织和世界银行——来扮演。他们的新口号是“附加条件”:不进行改革,就不提供资金。他们首选的机制是结构调整方案。债务国不得不采取的政策被称为“华盛顿共识”,这是一份包含十项经济政策的清单,如果放在一百年前,一定会让英国殖民统治者欣喜若狂。*第一项是实施财政纪律,以减少或消除赤字。要扩大税基,降低税率。市场决定利率和汇率。要实现贸易自由化,至关重要的是,还要实现资本流动自由化。突然间,在布雷顿森林体系下被禁止的“热钱”又重新流行起来。

With currencies floating again and offshore markets like the Eurobond market flourishing, the 1970s saw a revival of non-governmental capital export. In particular, there was a rush by Western banks to recycle the rapidly growing surpluses of the oil-exporting countries. The region where the bankers chose to lend the Middle Eastern petrodollars was an old favourite. Between 1975 and 1982, Latin America quadrupled its borrowings from foreigners from $75 billion to more than $315 billion. (Eastern European countries also entered the capital debt market, a sure sign of the Communist bloc’s impending doom.) Then, in August 1982, Mexico declared that it would no longer be able to service its debt. An entire continent teetered on the verge of declaring bankruptcy. Yet the days had gone when investors could confidently expect their governments to send a gunboat when a foreign government misbehaved. Now the role of financial policing had to be played by two unarmed bankers, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Their new watchword became ‘conditionality’: no reforms, no money. Their preferred mechanism was the structural adjustment programme. And the policies the debtor countries had to adopt became known as the Washington Consensus, a wish-list of ten economic policies that would have gladdened the heart of a British imperial administrator a hundred years before.* Number one was to impose fiscal discipline to reduce or eliminate deficits. The tax base was to be broadened and tax rates lowered. The market was to set interest and exchange rates. Trade was to be liberalized and so, crucially, were capital flows. Suddenly ‘hot’ money, which had been outlawed at Bretton Woods, was hot again.

然而,在一些批评者看来,世界银行和国际货币基金组织与老一套的美国帝国主义代理人并无二致。他们声称,来自国际货币基金组织或世界银行的任何贷款都将被用来从美国公司购买美国商品——通常是武器,以维持残暴的独裁者或腐败的寡头集团的统治。“结构调整”的成本将由其不幸的臣民承担。而任何越轨的第三世界领导人很快就会发现自己身陷困境。这些论点在20世纪90年代变得尤为流行,当时反全球化抗议活动成为国际集会的常态。当这些观点被写在标语牌上或由人群高声喊口号时,对于从小养育子女的西方青年来说,这种观点很容易被忽视。但当布雷顿森林体系内部人士提出类似的指控时,就值得我们仔细审视了。

To some critics, however, the World Bank and the IMF were no better than agents of the same old Yankee imperialism. Any loans from the IMF or World Bank, it was claimed, would simply be used to buy American goods from American firms – often arms to keep ruthless dictators or corrupt oligarchies in power. The costs of ‘structural adjustment’ would be borne by their hapless subjects. And Third World leaders who stepped out of line would soon find themselves in trouble. These became popular arguments, particularly in the 1990s, when anti-globalization protests became regular features of international gatherings. When articulated on placards or in rowdy chants by crowds of well-fed Western youths such notions are relatively easy to dismiss. But when similar charges are levelled at the Bretton Woods institutions by former insiders, they merit closer scrutiny.

约翰·珀金斯声称,他担任总部位于波士顿的查斯·T·梅恩公司首席经济学家时,其职责是确保国际货币基金组织和世界银行借给厄瓜多尔和巴拿马等国的资金用于购买美国公司提供的商品。珀金斯说,像他这样的“经济杀手”“接受过训练……目的是建立美国帝国……创造尽可能多的资源流入美国、流入美国公司和流入美国政府的局面”。

When he was chief economist of the Boston-based company Chas. T. Main, Inc., John Perkins claims he was employed to ensure that the money lent to countries like Ecuador and Panama by the IMF and World Bank would be spent on goods supplied by US corporations. ‘Economic hit men’ like himself, according to Perkins, ‘were trained . . . to build up the American empire . . . to create situations where as many resources as possible flow into this country, to our corporations, and our governments’:

这个帝国,与世界历史上任何其他帝国都截然不同,它主要是通过经济操纵、欺骗、诈骗、诱使人们接受我们的生活方式以及经济杀手等手段建立起来的……我的真正工作……是向其他国家提供贷款,巨额贷款,远远超过他们偿还的能力……所以我们发放了这笔巨额贷款,其中大部分最终都回到了美国,这些国家背负了债务和巨额利息,他们基本上变成了我们的仆人,我们的奴隶。这是一个帝国。这一点毋庸置疑。这是一个庞大的帝国。61

This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men . . . My real job . . . was giving loans to other countries, huge loans, much bigger than they could possibly repay . . . So we make this big loan, most of it comes back to the United States, the country is left with debt plus lots of interest, and they basically become our servants, our slaves. It’s an empire. There’s no two ways about it. It’s a huge empire.61

根据珀金斯在其著作《一个经济杀手的自白》中的描述,两位拉丁美洲领导人——厄瓜多尔的杰米·罗尔多斯·阿吉莱拉和巴拿马的奥马尔·托里霍斯——于1981年遇刺身亡,原因是他们反对他所谓的“以建立全球帝国为目标的企业、政府和银行巨头联盟”。 62诚然,他的故事中有些地方显得有些蹊跷。美国并没有向厄瓜多尔和巴拿马提供多少贷款。20世纪70年代,两国贷款总额分别为9600万美元和1.97亿美元,不到美国援助和贷款总额的0.4%。而且,厄瓜多尔和巴拿马也不是美国的主要客户。1990年,两国分别占美国出口总额的0.17%和0.22%。这些数字似乎并不值得为此杀人。正如鲍勃·佐利克所说,“国际货币基金组织世界银行向处于危机中的国家提供贷款,而不是向那些能为美国企业带来巨大机遇的国家提供贷款。

According to Perkins’s book, The Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, two Latin American leaders, Jaime Roldós Aguilera of Ecuador and Omar Torrijos of Panama, were assassinated in 1981 for opposing what he calls ‘that fraternity of corporate, government, and banking heads whose goal is global empire’.62 There is, admittedly, something about his story that seems a little odd. It is not as if the United States had lent much money to Ecuador and Panama. In the 1970s the totals were just $96 million and $197 million, less than 0.4 per cent of total US grants and loans. And it is not as if Ecuador and Panama were major customers for the United States. In 1990 they accounted for, respectively, 0.17 per cent and 0.22 per cent of total US exports. Those do not seem like figures worth killing for. As Bob Zoellick puts it, ‘The IMF and the World Bank lend money to countries in crisis, not countries that offer huge opportunities to corporate America.’

然而,新帝国主义的指责始终挥之不去。诺贝尔经济学奖得主约瑟夫·斯蒂格利茨(Joseph Stiglitz)曾于1997年至2000年担任世界银行首席经济学家,他认为,20世纪80年代的国际货币基金组织(IMF)不仅“以意识形态的热情拥护市场至上”,而且“对其自身角色持有相当帝国主义的观点”。此外,斯蒂格利茨指出,“IMF推行的许多政策,特别是过早的资本市场自由化,加剧了全球不稳定……就业岗位遭到系统性破坏……[因为]资本市场自由化之后,大量热钱涌入和流出该国,往往会造成混乱……即使是那些经历了有限增长的国家,其利益也主要流向了富裕阶层,尤其是超级富豪阶层。” 63斯蒂格利茨对国际货币基金组织(以及华尔街)抱有敌意,却忽略了一个事实:在20世纪80年代,并非只有这些机构才支持恢复资本自由流动。实际上,是经济合作与发展组织率先开辟了自由化道路,随后(在雅克·德洛尔和米歇尔·康德苏等法国社会主义者转变立场后)欧盟委员会和欧洲理事会也加入了这一行列。事实上,可以说在华盛顿共识出现之前就已经存在了巴黎共识(尽管在许多方面,它都是建立在更早的波恩共识之上,后者支持自由资本市场)。64在伦敦,玛格丽特·撒切尔政府也在没有任何美国推动的情况下,单方面推进了资本账户自由化。相反,是里根政府追随了撒切尔的脚步

Nevertheless, the charge of neo-imperialism refuses to go away. According to Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who was chief economist at the World Bank between 1997 and 2000, the IMF in the 1980s not only ‘champion[ed] market supremacy with ideological fervour’ but also ‘took a rather imperialistic view’ of its role. Moreover, Stiglitz argues, ‘many of the policies that the IMF has pushed, in particular premature capital market liberalization, have contributed to global instability . . . Jobs have been systematically destroyed . . . [because] the influx of hot money into and out of the country that so frequently follows after capital market liberalization leaves havoc in its wake . . . Even those countries that have experienced some limited growth have seen the benefits accrue to the well-off, and especially the very well-off.’63 In his animus against the IMF (and Wall Street), Stiglitz overlooks the fact that it was not just those institutions that came to favour a return to free capital movements in the 1980s. It was actually the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that blazed the liberalizing trail, followed (after the conversion of French socialists like Jacques Delors and Michel Camdessus) by the European Commission and European Council. Indeed, there was arguably a Paris Consensus before there was a Washington Consensus (though in many ways it was building on a much earlier Bonn Consensus in favour of free capital markets).64 In London, too, Margaret Thatcher’s government pressed ahead with unilateral capital account liberalization without any prompting from the United States. Rather, it was the Reagan administration that followed Thatcher’s lead.

厄瓜多尔的海梅·罗尔多斯·阿奎莱拉。 。 。

Jaime Roldós Aguilera of Ecuador . . .

……以及巴拿马的奥马尔·托里霍斯:据称是“经济杀手”的受害者

. . . and Omar Torrijos of Panama: Allegedly victims of the ‘economic hit men’

斯蒂格利茨对国际货币基金组织最大的不满在于,它对1997年亚洲金融危机的应对方式错误。尽管它向陷入困境的国家提供了总计950亿美元的贷款,但却附加了华盛顿共识式的条件(更高的利率、更小的政府赤字),而这些条件实际上加剧了危机。这一观点也得到了部分人士的认同,其中包括……其他观点者包括经济学家兼专栏作家保罗·克鲁格曼。65 1997 -98年危机的严重性毋庸置疑。印尼、马来西亚、韩国和泰国等国在1998年经历了非常严重的经济衰退。然而,无论是斯蒂格利茨还是克鲁格曼,都未能就如何按照标准的凯恩斯主义路线(允许货币浮动和政府赤字增加)更好地应对东亚危机提出令人信服的解释。正如肯尼斯·罗格夫(亚洲金融危机后成为国际货币基金组织首席经济学家)在一封写给斯蒂格利茨的公开信中尖锐地指出:

Stiglitz’s biggest complaint against the IMF is that it responded the wrong way to the Asian financial crisis of 1997, lending a total of $95 billion to countries in difficulty, but attaching Washington Consensus-style conditions (higher interest rates, smaller government deficits) that actually served to worsen the crisis. It is a view that has been partially echoed by, among others, the economist and columnist Paul Krugman.65 There is no doubting the severity of the 1997–8 crisis. In countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea and Thailand there was a very severe recession in 1998. Yet neither Stiglitz nor Krugman offers a convincing account of how the East Asian crisis might have been better managed on standard Keynesian lines, with currencies being allowed to float and government deficits to rise. In the acerbic words of an open letter to Stiglitz by Kenneth Rogoff, who became chief economist at the IMF after the Asian crisis:

各国政府通常在债务难以出售、货币贬值时才会向国际货币基金组织(IMF)寻求财政援助。斯蒂格利茨的处方是增加财政赤字,也就是发行更多债务、印更多钞票。你似乎认为,如果一个陷入困境的政府发行更多货币,其公民就会突然觉得它更有价值。你似乎认为,当投资者不再愿意持有政府债务时,只需增加供应量,它就会像热销商品一样抢手。我们——不,应该说我们地球上的所有人——拥有大量经验表明事实并非如此。我们地球人发现,当一个财政困境的国家试图通过印更多钞票来摆脱困境时,通货膨胀会上升,而且往往无法控制……在你们所在的伽马象限,经济规律可能有所不同,但在我们这里,我们发现,当一个濒临破产的政府无法有效地控制其财政赤字的时间变化时,情况通常会变得更糟,而不是更好。66

Governments typically come to the IMF for financial assistance when they are having trouble finding buyers for their debt and when the value of their money is falling. The Stiglitzian prescription is to raise . . . fiscal deficits, that is, to issue more debt and to print more money. You seem to believe that if a distressed government issues more currency, its citizens will suddenly think it more valuable. You seem to believe that when investors are no longer willing to hold a government’s debt, all that needs to be done is to increase the supply and it will sell like hot cakes. We at the – no, make that we on planet Earth – have considerable experience suggesting otherwise. We earthlings have found that when a country in fiscal distress tries to escape by printing more money, inflation rises, often uncontrollably . . . The laws of economics may be different in your part of the gamma quadrant, but around here we find that when an almost bankrupt government fails to credibly constrain the time profile of its fiscal deficits, things generally get worse instead of better.66

马来西亚在1997年暂时实施的资本管制是否对危机期间的经济表现产生了显著影响,这一点也尚不明确。克鲁格曼至少承认,东亚金融机构虽然以美元进行短期借款,但却以本币进行长期放贷,这在一定程度上影响了经济。(通常是对政治亲信)他要为这场危机承担大部分责任。然而,他关于大萧条经济模式回归的说法现在看来有些夸张。东亚从未经历过大萧条(或许日本是个例外,但日本很难被描绘成国际货币基金组织不当行为的受害者)。1998年的冲击过后,所有受影响的经济体都迅速恢复了快速增长——事实上,增长速度如此之快,以至于到2004年,一些评论员开始质疑布雷顿森林体系的“两姐妹”是否还能继续作为国际贷款机构发挥作用。67

Nor is it clear that Malaysia’s temporary imposition of capital controls in 1997 made a significant difference to the economy’s performance during the crisis. Krugman at least acknowledges that the East Asian financial institutions, which had borrowed short-term in dollars but lent out long-term in local currency (often to political cronies), bore much of the responsibility for the crisis. Yet his talk of a return of Depression economics now looks overdone. There never was a Depression in East Asia (except perhaps in Japan, which could hardly be portrayed as a victim of IMF malfeasance). After the shock of 1998 all the economies affected returned swiftly to rapid growth – growth so rapid, indeed, that by 2004 some commentators were wondering if the ‘two sisters’ of Bretton Woods any longer had a role to play as international lenders.67

事实上,20世纪80年代出现了一种截然不同的经济杀手,他们比珀金斯笔下的那些人更令人胆寒,原因就在于他们根本不需要考虑诉诸暴力就能达成目标。对这新一代人来说,“完成一次暗杀”意味着通过一次成功的投机赚取十亿美元。随着冷战接近尾声,这些杀手对推行美国帝国主义议程毫无兴趣;相反,他们公开的政治倾向往往更偏向自由主义而非保守主义。他们不为国际货币基金组织或世界银行等公共部门机构效力。相反,他们经营着完全私有的企业,甚至没有在股票市场上市。这些企业被称为对冲基金,我们在第四章中首次将其作为一种另类的风险管理形式提及。与中国的崛起一样,对冲基金的迅猛发展是二战以来全球经济经历的最大变革之一。作为监管宽松、流动性极强的资本池,对冲基金体现了在大萧条开始到布雷顿森林体系瓦解这段时期之后,热钱的回归。而公认的新一代经济掮客的领头羊是……正是乔治·索罗斯。1997年8月,马来西亚总理马哈蒂尔·穆罕默德想要为令吉货币危机找个替罪羊,他没有指责国际货币基金组织,而是称索罗斯为“白痴”,这绝非巧合。

In truth, the 1980s saw the rise of an altogether different kind of economic hit man, far more intimidating than those portrayed by Perkins precisely because they never even had to contemplate resorting to violence to achieve their objective. To this new generation, making a hit meant making a billion dollars on a single successful speculation. As the Cold War drew to its close, these hit men had no real interest in pursuing an American imperialist agenda; on the contrary, their stated political inclinations were more often liberal than conservative. They did not work for public sector institutions like the IMF or the World Bank. On the contrary, they ran businesses that were entirely private, to the extent that they were not even quoted on the stock market. These businesses were called hedge funds, which we first encountered as an alternative form of risk manager in Chapter 4. Like the rise of China, the even more rapid rise of the hedge funds has been one of the biggest changes the global economy has witnessed since the Second World War. As pools of lightly regulated,* highly mobile capital, hedge funds exemplify the return of hot money after the big chill that prevailed between the onset of the Depression and the end of Bretton Woods. And the acknowledged capo dei capi of the new economic hit men has been George Soros. It was no coincidence that when the Malaysian prime minister Mahathir bin Mohamad wanted to blame someone other than himself for the currency crisis that struck the ringgit in August 1997, it was Soros rather than the IMF that he called ‘a moron’.


乔治·索罗斯:对冲基金之王和反思大师

George Soros: hedge fund capo dei capi and master of reflexivity

乔治·索罗斯出生于匈牙利,是犹太人,在伦敦接受教育,1956年移居美国。他在那里担任分析师,后来成为历史悠久的阿诺德和S.布莱希罗德公司(Arnhold & S. Bleichroeder,该公司是柏林一家私人银行的直系后裔,该银行曾管理俾斯麦的资金)的研究主管,并因此声名鹊起。正如人们对一位中欧知识分子所预期的那样——他将自己的基金命名为“量子基金”,以纪念物理学家维尔纳·海森堡的不确定性原理——索罗斯认为自己索罗斯更像是一位哲学家而非职业杀手。他的著作《金融炼金术》(1987)开篇便大胆批判了经济学这门学科的基本假设,这反映了哲学家卡尔·波普尔对其早期思想发展的影响。 69根据索罗斯的“反身性”理论,金融市场不能被视为完全有效,因为价格反映了数百万投资者的无知和偏见,而这些偏见往往是非理性的。索罗斯认为,“市场参与者不仅存在偏见,而且他们的偏见还会影响事件的进程。这可能会给人一种错觉,即市场能够准确预测未来的发展,但事实上,并非当前的预期对应着未来的事件,而是未来的事件受到当前预期的影响。” 70索罗斯将这种反馈效应——投资者的偏见影响市场结果,而市场结果反过来又会改变投资者的偏见,如此循环往复地影响市场结果——称为反身性。正如他在最新著作中所说:

A Hungarian Jew by birth, though educated in London, George Soros emigrated to the United States in 1956. There he made his reputation as an analyst and then head of research at the venerable house of Arnhold & S. Bleichroeder (a direct descendant of the Berlin private bank that had once managed Bismarck’s money).68 As might be expected of a Central European intellectual – who named his fund the Quantum Fund in honour of the physicist Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle – Soros regards himself as more a philosopher than a hit man. His book The Alchemy of Finance (1987) begins with a bold critique of the fundamental assumptions of economics as a subject, reflecting the influence on his early intellectual development of the philosopher Karl Popper.69 According to Soros’s pet theory of ‘reflexivity’, financial markets cannot be regarded as perfectly efficient, because prices are reflections of the ignorance and biases, often irrational, of millions of investors. ‘Not only do market participants operate with a bias’, Soros argues, ‘but their bias can also influence the course of events. This may create the impression that markets anticipate future developments accurately, but in fact it is not present expectations that correspond to future events but future events that are shaped by present expectations.’70 It is the feedback effect – as investors’ biases affect market outcomes, which in turn change investors’ biases, which again affect market outcomes – that Soros calls reflexivity. As he puts it in his most recent book:

……市场永远无法达到经济理论所假设的均衡状态。感知与现实之间存在双向的反射性联系,这可能导致最初自我强化但最终自我挫败的繁荣-萧条循环,即泡沫。每个泡沫都由一种趋势和一种误解以反射性的方式相互作用构成。71

. . . markets never reach the equilibrium postulated by economic theory. There is a two-way reflexive connection between perception and reality which can give rise to initially self-reinforcing but eventually self-defeating boom-bust processes, or bubbles. Every bubble consists of a trend and a misconception that interact in a reflexive manner.71

对冲基金最初是为了通过做空来对冲市场风险而设立的,*做空证券价格下跌时即可获利。它为索罗斯提供了一个完美的工具,让他得以运用自己对市场反射性的深刻见解。需要强调的是,索罗斯也深谙做多之道——即买入资产以期未来价格上涨。1969年,他做多房地产。三年后,他又投资了银行。他认为股票将会腾飞。1971年,他做多日本股票;1972年,他做多石油股票。一年后,当这些押注已经开始盈利时,他从以色列对赎罪日战争中美国提​​供的武器装备质量的抱怨中推断出,美国国防工业需要大量投资。于是,他也开始做多国防类股票。72 他判断完全正确。但索罗斯最大的成功并非来自于对赢家的判断,而是对输家的判断:例如,1985年,他做空了电报公司西联,因为传真技术威胁到了西联的业务,美元也随之暴跌,这要归功于1985年9月22日五国集团广场协议的签署。73那一年对索罗斯来说是奇迹之年,他的基金增长了122%。但他所有做空中最成功的一笔,最终成为了英国金融史上最重大的投资之一。

Originally devised to hedge against market risk with short positions,* which make money if a security goes down in price, a hedge fund provided the perfect vehicle for Soros to exploit his insights about reflexive markets. Soros knew how to make money from long positions, too, it should be emphasized – that is, from buying assets in the expectation of future prices rises. In 1969 he was long real estate. Three years later he backed bank stocks to take off. He was long Japan in 1971. He was long oil in 1972. A year later, when these bets were already paying off, he deduced from Israeli complaints about the quality of US-supplied hardware in the Yom Kippur War that there would need to be some heavy investment in America’s defence industries. So he went long defence stocks, too.72 Right, right, right, right and right again. But Soros’s biggest coups came from being right about losers, not winners: for example, the telegraph company Western Union in 1985, as fax technology threatened to destroy its business, as well as the US dollar, which duly plunged after the Group of Five’s Plaza Accord of 22 September 1985.73 That year was an annus mirabilis for Soros, who saw his fund grow by 122 per cent. But the greatest of all his shorts proved to be one of the most momentous bets in British financial history.

命运之力:财政大臣诺曼·拉蒙特宣布英镑退出欧洲汇率机制,1992年9月16日

The force of destiny: Chancellor the Exchequer Norman Lamont announces sterling’s exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, 16 September 1992

我承认我对1992年9月16日星期三发生的事件有着切身利益。那时,我在剑桥大学担任初级讲师,同时兼职为报纸撰写社论,索罗斯深信,如果与英格兰银行摊牌,像他这样的投机者能够战胜英格兰银行。这背后的逻辑很简单:每天在外汇市场上交易的金额高达一万亿美元,而英格兰银行的外汇储备却少得可怜。索罗斯推断,德国统一成本的上升将推高利率,进而推高德国马克。这将使保守党政府的“跟随德国马克”政策——该政策在英国于1990年加入欧洲汇率机制(ERM)时正式确立——难以为继。随着利率上升,英国经济将崩溃。迟早,政府将被迫退出ERM并让英镑贬值。索罗斯对英镑贬值如此确信,以至于他最终投入了100亿美元——超过了他基金的全部资本——进行一系列交易。在这些交易中,他实际上是在英国借入英镑,然后以9月16日之前的约2.95德国马克兑1英镑的价格投资于德国马克。74我同样确信英镑会贬值,尽管我唯一能赌的只是我的信誉。结果,我供职报纸的金融版编辑却不这么认为。那天晚上,在与编辑举行的社论撰稿人晨会上,我被他狠狠训斥了一顿,之后我去了英国国家歌剧院,听威尔第的歌剧《命运之力》。事实证明,这是一个非常恰当的选择。中场休息时,有人宣布英国退出了欧洲汇率机制。我们都欢呼雀跃——除了乔治·索罗斯之外,没有人比我更兴奋。随着英镑暴跌——最终跌幅高达20%——他的基金赚了超过10亿美元,这使得索罗斯能够以新的较低汇率偿还他借的英镑,并将差价收入囊中。而这笔交易仅占全年利润的40% 。75

I admit I have a vested interest in the events of Wednesday 16 September 1992. In those days, moonlighting as a newspaper leader writer while I was a junior lecturer at Cambridge, I became convinced that speculators like Soros could beat the Bank of England if it came to a showdown. It was simple arithmetic: a trillion dollars being traded on foreign exchange markets every day, versus the Bank’s meagre hard currency reserves. Soros reasoned that the rising costs of German reunification would drive up interest rates and hence the Deutschmark. This would make the Conservative government’s policy of shadowing the German currency – formalized when Britain had joined the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) in 1990 – untenable. As interest rates rose, the British economy would tank. Sooner or later, the government would be forced to withdraw from the ERM and devalue the pound. So sure was Soros that the pound would drop that he ultimately bet $10 billion, more than the entire capital of his fund, on a series of transactions whereby he effectively borrowed sterling in the UK and invested in German currency at the pre-16 September price of around 2.95 Deutschmarks).74 I was equally sure that the pound would be devalued, though all I had to bet was my credibility. As it happened, the City editor of the newspaper I wrote for disagreed. That night, having been given something of a browbeating at the leader writers’ morning conference with the editor, I went to the English National Opera, to hear Verdi’s The Force of Destiny. It proved a highly appropriate choice. Someone announced at the interval that Britain had withdrawn from the ERM. How we all cheered – and no one louder than me (except possibly George Soros). His fund made more than a billion dollars as sterling slumped – ultimately by as much as 20 per cent – allowing Soros to repay the sterling he had borrowed but at the new lower exchange rate and to pocket the difference. And that trade accounted for just 40 per cent of the year’s profits.75

量子基金的成功令人震惊。如果有人在1969年索罗斯创立第二只基金(双鹰基金,即量子基金的前身)时投资了10万美元,并将所有股息再投资,到1994年,他的财富将达到1.3亿美元,年均增长率高达35%。76新旧基金之间的本质区别经济杀手具备两方面特质:首先,他们冷酷无情,对任何特定国家都不忠诚——做空美元和英镑都可肆无忌惮;其次,这些新贵们拥有庞大的资金规模。“你的仓位有多大?”索罗斯曾问他的合伙人斯坦利·德鲁肯米勒。“十亿美元,”德鲁肯米勒回答。“你管这叫仓位?”索罗斯讽刺地反问道。 77对索罗斯来说,如果一笔押注看起来像他在1992年做空英镑那样有利可图,那么就应该使用最大杠杆。他的对冲基金率先采用从投资银行借款的策略,以便建立远超基金自有资本的投机性多头或空头头寸。

The success of the Quantum Fund was staggering. If someone had invested $100,000 with Soros when he established his second fund (Double Eagle, the earlier name of Quantum) in 1969 and had reinvested all the dividends, he would have been worth $130 million by 1994, an average annual growth rate of 35 per cent.76 The essential differences between the old and the new economic hit men were twofold: first, the cold, calculating absence of loyalty to any particular country – the dollar and the pound could both be shorted with impunity; second, the sheer scale of the money the new men had to play with. ‘How big a position do you have?’ Soros once asked his partner Stanley Druckenmiller. ‘One billion dollars,’ Druckenmiller replied. ‘You call that a position?’ was Soros’s sardonic retort.77 For Soros, if a bet looked as good as his bet against the pound in 1992, then maximum leverage should be applied to it. His hedge fund pioneered the technique of borrowing from investment banks in order to take speculative long or short positions far in excess of the fund’s own capital.

然而,对冲基金的权力也是有限的。在某种程度上,索罗斯及其同僚已经证明,市场的力量胜过任何政府或央行。但这并不意味着对冲基金总能掌控市场。索罗斯的成功归功于他对“电子羊群”走向的敏锐直觉。然而,即使是他的直觉(通常伴随着一阵背痛)有时也会出错。正如他自己所承认的,反身性是一种特例;它并非每年每周都能主宰市场。那么,如果直觉能够被数学所取代呢?如果能够写出一个万无一失的代数公式,从而获得两位数的回报呢?在世界的另一端——实际上是在金融星系的另一端——似乎这个公式刚刚被发现。

Yet there were limits to the power of the hedge funds. At one level, Soros and his ilk had proved that the markets were mightier than any government or central bank. But that was not the same as saying that the hedge funds could always command the markets. Soros owed his success to a gut instinct about the direction of the ‘electronic herd’. However, even his instincts (often signalled by a spasm of back pain) could sometimes be wrong. Reflexivity, as he himself acknowledges, is a special case; it does not rule the markets every week of the year. What, then, if instincts could somehow be replaced by mathematics? What if you could write an infallible algebraic formula for double-digit returns? On the other side of the world – indeed on the other side of the financial galaxy – it seemed as if that formula had just been discovered.

短期资本管理不善

Short-Term Capital Mismanagement

想象一下另一个星球——一个没有主观、有时甚至非理性的人类所造成的种种复杂摩擦的星球。那里的居民无所不知,完全理性;他们能瞬间吸收所有新信息并利用它们最大化利润;他们永不停歇地进行交易;市场持续运转,毫无摩擦,且完全……流动性极强。这个星球上的金融市场将遵循“随机游走”规律,这意味着每天的价格都与前一天的价格毫无关联,但会反映所有可用的相关信息。该星球股票市场的收益率将呈正态分布,沿着钟形曲线分布(参见第三章),大多数年份的收益率都集中在均值附近,其中三分之二的年份收益率都在均值的一个标准差范围内。在这样的世界里,“六个标准差”的抛售潮就像我们世界里身高不足一英尺半的人一样罕见。它每四百万年的交易周期才会发生一次。78就是一些现代最杰出的金融经济学家所设想的星球。或许,它最终看起来像康涅狄格州的格林威治——地球上最乏味的地方之一——也并不令人意外。

Imagine another planet – a planet without all the complicating frictions caused by subjective, sometimes irrational human beings. One where the inhabitants were omniscient and perfectly rational; where they instantly absorbed all new information and used it to maximize profits; where they never stopped trading; where markets were continuous, frictionless and completely liquid. Financial markets on this planet would follow a ‘random walk’, meaning that each day’s prices would be quite unrelated to the previous day’s but would reflect all the relevant information available. The returns on the planet’s stock market would be normally distributed along the bell curve (see Chapter 3), with most years clustered closely around the mean, and two thirds of them within one standard deviation of the mean. In such a world, a ‘six standard deviation’ sell-off would be about as common as a person shorter than one and a half feet in our world. It would happen only once in four million years of trading.78 This was the planet imagined by some of the most brilliant financial economists of modern times. Perhaps it is not altogether surprising that it turned out to look like Greenwich, Connecticut, one of the blandest places on Earth.

1993年,两位数学天才带着一个宏大的想法来到格林威治。斯坦福大学的迈伦·斯科尔斯与高盛的费舍尔·布莱克密切合作,开发出一套革命性的期权定价理论。如今,他和另一位经济学家——哈佛商学院的罗伯特·默顿——希望将所谓的布莱克-斯科尔斯模型转化为一台赚钱机器。他们学术研究的起点是期权合约这种由来已久的金融工具,其运作方式(正如我们在第四章中看到的)如下:假设某只股票今天的价值是100美元,而我认为它在未来可能会涨价,比如一年后涨到200美元,那么拥有在未来某个日期以150美元的价格购买该股票的期权就非常有利。如果我的判断正确,我就能获利。如果判断错误,那也只是期权而已,无需担心。唯一的成本就是期权的价格,而这部分费用归卖方所有。关键问题在于,这个价格应该定在多少。

In 1993 two mathematical geniuses came to Greenwich with a big idea. Working closely with Fischer Black of Goldman Sachs, Stanford’s Myron Scholes had developed a revolutionary new theory of pricing options. Now he and a third economist, Harvard Business School’s Robert Merton, hoped to turn the so-called Black–Scholes model into a money-making machine. The starting point of their work as academics was the long-established financial instrument known as an option contract, which (as we saw in Chapter 4) works like this. If a particular stock is worth, say, $100 today and I believe that it may be worth more in the future, say, in a year’s time, $200, it would be nice to have the option to buy it at that future date for, say, $150. If I am right, I make a profit. If not, well, it was only an option, so forget about it. The only cost was the price of the option, which the seller pockets. The big question was what that price should be.

量化分析师——那些拥有博士学位、精通数学的分析师——有时会把布莱克-斯科尔斯期权定价模型称为“黑箱”。我们不妨探究一下这个“黑箱”的内部运作。重申一下,问题在于:如何为在未来特定日期购买特定股票的期权定价,同时还要考虑股票价格在这段时间内的不可预测的波动?准确计算出期权价格,与其仅仅依靠猜测,不如运用科学方法,这样你才真正配得上“火箭科学家”的称号。布莱克和斯科尔斯认为,期权的价值取决于五个变量:股票的当前市场价格(S)、约定的未来行权价格(X)、期权的到期日(T)、整体经济的无风险收益率(r),以及——至关重要的变量——股票的预期年波动率,即从购买到到期日期间其价格的可能波动幅度(σ,希腊字母西格玛)。凭借精妙的数学技巧,布莱克和斯科尔斯将期权的价格(C)简化为以下公式:

‘Quants’ – the mathematically skilled analysts with the PhDs – sometimes refer to the Black–Scholes model of options pricing as a black box. It is worth taking a look inside this particular box. The question, to repeat, is how to price an option to buy a particular stock on a particular date in the future, taking into account the unpredictable movement of the price of the stock in the intervening period. Work out that option price accurately, rather than just relying on guesswork, and you truly deserve the title ‘rocket scientist’. Black and Scholes reasoned that the option’s value depended on five variables: the current market price of the stock (S), the agreed future price at which the option could be exercised (X), the expiration date of the option (T), the risk-free rate of return in the economy as a whole (r) and – the crucial variable – the expected annual volatility of the stock, that is, the likely fluctuations of its price between the time of purchase and the expiration date (σ – the Greek letter sigma). With wonderful mathematical wizardry, Black and Scholes reduced the price of the option (C) to this formula:

在哪里

where

感觉有点困惑?看不懂代数?说实话,我也觉得困惑。但量化分析师们却乐见其成。为了利用这种洞察力赚钱,他们需要市场充斥着对期权定价一窍不通、只凭(往往不准的)直觉行事的人。他们还需要强大的计算能力,这股力量自20世纪80年代初以来一直在改变着金融市场。他们现在只需要一个精通市场的合伙人,就能从大学教授的圈子跃升到交易大厅。费舍尔·布莱克身患癌症,无法成为他们的合伙人。于是,默顿和斯科尔斯找到了约翰·梅里韦瑟,这位曾任所罗门兄弟公司债券套利部门主管的人物,在20世纪80年代末的储贷危机中赚得盆满钵满。他们在1994年创立的公司名为长期资本管理公司(Long-Term Capital Management)。

Feeling a bit baffled? Can’t follow the algebra? To be honest, I am baffled, too. But that was just fine by the quants. To make money from this insight, they needed markets to be full of people who didn’t have a clue how to price options but relied instead on their (seldom accurate) gut instincts. They also needed a great deal of computing power, a force which had been transforming the financial markets since the early 1980s. All they required now was a partner with some market savvy and they could make the leap from the faculty club to the trading floor. Struck down by cancer, Fischer Black could not be that partner. Instead, Merton and Scholes turned to John Meriwether, the former head of the bond arbitrage group at Salomon Brothers, who had made his first fortune out of the Savings and Loans meltdown of the late 1980s. The firm they created in 1994 was called Long-Term Capital Management.

这看起来像是一支梦幻团队:两位学术界最炙手可热的量化分析师,加上前所罗门兄弟公司的超级明星,以及前美联储副主席、另一位前哈佛大学教授大卫·穆林斯,共同组成了这支团队。埃里克·罗森菲尔德,以及一群前所罗门交易员(维克多·哈加尼、拉里·希利布兰德和汉斯·胡夫施密德)。长期资本管理公司(LTCM)吸引的投资者主要是大型银行,其中包括纽约投资银行美林证券和瑞士私人银行宝盛银行。另一家瑞士银行瑞银集团后来也加入了进来。79最低投资额为1000万美元。作为回报,合伙人将获得管理资产的2%和利润的25%(现在大多数对冲基金的收费比例为2%和20%,而不是2%和25%)。80投资者将被锁定三年才能退出。另一家华尔街公司贝尔斯登随时准备执行长期资本管理公司想要进行的任何交易。

It seemed like the dream team: two of academia’s hottest quants teaming up with the ex-Salomon superstar plus a former Federal Reserve vice-chairman, David Mullins, another ex-Harvard professor, Eric Rosenfeld, and a bevy of ex-Salomon traders (Victor Haghani, Larry Hilibrand and Hans Hufschmid). The investors LTCM attracted to its fund were mainly big banks, among them the New York investment bank Merrill Lynch and the Swiss private bank Julius Baer. A latecomer to the party was another Swiss bank, UBS.79 The minimum investment was $10 million. As compensation, the partners would take 2 per cent of the assets under management and 25 per cent of the profits (most hedge funds now charge 2 and 20, rather than 2 and 25).80 Investors would be locked in for three years before they could exit. And another Wall Street firm, Bear Stearns, would stand ready to execute whatever trades Long-Term wanted to make.

在成立的头两年,由长期资本管理公司(LTCM)管理的这只基金赚得盆满钵满,即使扣除高额费用后,收益率也分别达到了43%和41%。如果你在1994年3月投资1000万美元到长期基金,四年后这笔投资的价值将超过4000万美元。到1997年9月,该基金的净资本达到了67亿美元。合伙人的持股比例增长了十倍以上。诚然,为了在不断增长的资产管理规模上获得如此巨额的回报,长期基金不得不像乔治·索罗斯一样进行借贷。这种额外的杠杆使他们能够投入的资金远不止自有资金。到1997年8月底,该基金的资本为67亿美元,但其资产负债表上的债务融资资产高达1264亿美元,资产与资本之比为19:1。1998年4月,其资产负债表上的债务融资资产已达到1340亿美元。当我们谈到高杠杆时,大多数学者指的是他们的自行车。但当默顿和斯科尔斯这样说时,他们指的是长期基金的大部分交易资金都是借来的。但这笔巨额债务并没有吓倒他们。他们的数学模型显示,其中几乎没有风险。首先,他们同时采用了多种互不相关的交易策略:大约一百种策略,总共持有7600个不同的仓位。其中一项可能会出错,甚至两项也可能出错。但所有这些不同的押注不可能同时出错。这就是多元化投资组合的魅力所在——现代金融理论的另一个关键洞见,由芝加哥大学毕业的哈里·M·马科维茨正式提出。兰德公司经济学家在 20 世纪 50 年代初提出了这一概念,并在威廉·夏普的资本资产定价模型 (CAPM) 中得到了进一步发展。83

In its first two years, the fund managed by LTCM made megabucks, posting returns (even after its hefty fees) of 43 and 41 per cent. If you had invested $10 million in Long-Term in March 1994, it would have been worth just over $40 million four years later. By September 1997 the fund’s net capital stood at $6.7 billion. The partners’ stakes had increased by a factor of more than ten. Admittedly, to generate these huge returns on an ever-growing pool of assets under management, Long-Term had to borrow, like George Soros. This additional leverage allowed them to bet more than just their own money. At the end of August 1997 the fund’s capital was $6.7 billion, but the debt-financed assets on its balance sheet amounted to $126.4 billion, a ratio of assets to capital of 19 to 1.81 By April 1998 the balance sheet had reached $134 billion. When we talk about being highly geared, most academics are referring to their bicycles. But when Merton and Scholes did so, they meant Long-Term was borrowing most of the money it traded with. Not that this pile of debt scared them. Their mathematical models said there was next to no risk involved. For one thing, they were simultaneously pursuing multiple, uncorrelated trading strategies: around a hundred of them, with a total of 7,600 different positions.82 One might go wrong, or even two. But all these different bets just could not go wrong simultaneously. That was the beauty of a diversified portfolio – another key insight of modern financial theory, which had been formalized by Harry M. Markowitz, a Chicago-trained economist at the Rand Corporation, in the early 1950s, and further developed in William Sharpe’s Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM).83

Long-Term公司通过利用多个市场的价格差异获利:固定利率住房抵押贷款市场;美国、日本和欧洲政府债券市场;以及更为复杂的利率互换市场* ——事实上,只要他们的模型发现价格异常,即两种本质上相同的资产或期权价格略有不同,他们就会从中获利。但该公司最大的赌注,也是最明显基于布莱克-斯科尔斯公式的赌注,是出售美国和欧洲股票市场的长期期权;换句话说,就是让其他人拥有期权,如果未来股价出现大幅波动,他们就可以行使这些期权。根据布莱克-斯科尔斯公式,这些期权在1998年的价格意味着未来波动率异常高,约为每年22%。Long-Term公司认为波动率实际上会回落到近期10-13%的平均水平,因此大量囤积这些期权,然后低价抛售。为了防范更高的市场波动——例如,避免再次发生类似1987年的股市抛售——银行纷纷买入期权。长期投资公司卖出了如此多的此类期权,以至于有人开始称其为“波动性中央银行”。 84在高峰时期,他们押注于美国股市波动率每变化一个百分点,就投入4000万美元。 85

Long-Term made money by exploiting price discrepancies in multiple markets: in the fixed-rate residential mortgage market; in the US, Japanese and European government bond markets; in the more complex market for interest rate swaps* – anywhere, in fact, where their models spotted a pricing anomaly, whereby two fundamentally identical assets or options had fractionally different prices. But the biggest bet the firm put on, and the one most obviously based on the Black–Scholes formula, was selling long-dated options on American and European stock markets; in other words giving other people options which they would exercise if there were big future stock price movements. The prices these options were fetching in 1998 implied, according to the Black–Scholes formula, an abnormally high future volatility of around 22 per cent per year. In the belief that volatility would actually move towards its recent average of 10–13 per cent, Long-Term piled these options high and sold them cheap. Banks wanting to protect themselves against higher volatility – for example, another 1987-style stock market sell-off – were happy buyers. Long-Term sold so many such options that some people started calling it the Central Bank of Volatility.84 At peak, they had $40 million riding on each percentage point change in US equity volatility.85

听起来风险很大?长期基金的量化分析师们却不这么认为。长期基金的卖点之一是声称自己是一只市场中性基金——换句话说,任何主要股票、债券或货币市场的大幅波动都不会对其造成影响。所谓的动态对冲策略使他们能够在卖出特定股票指数期权的同时,避免直接投资于该指数本身。更重要的是,该基金几乎没有投资于新兴市场。长期基金仿佛真的存在于另一个星球上。这与现实世界金融领域的平凡起伏截然不同。事实上,合伙人开始担心他们承担的风险不够。他们的目标是将风险水平控制在资产年波动率(标准差)的20%以内。而实际上,他们的风险水平接近目标的一半。86

Sounds risky? The quants at Long-Term didn’t think so. Among Long-Term’s selling points was the claim that they were a market neutral fund – in other words they could not be hurt by a significant movement in any of the major stock, bond or currency markets. So-called dynamic hedging allowed them to sell options on a particular stock index while avoiding exposure to the index itself. What was more, the fund had virtually no exposure to emerging markets. It was as if Long-Term really was on another planet, far from the mundane ups and downs of terrestrial finance. Indeed, the partners started to worry that they weren’t taking enough risks. Their target was a risk level corresponding to an annual variation (standard deviation) of 20 per cent of their assets. In practice, they were operating at closer to half that.86

要让这家公司在一年内损失全部资本,需要发生十倍标准差(即十个标准差)的重大事件。但这种事件发生的概率只有1/10²⁴——几乎为零。⁸⁷根据量化分析师的“风险价值”(VaR)模型,这家公司是不可摧毁的。

It would take a ten-sigma (in other words, ten standard deviation) event to cause the firm to lose all its capital in a single year. But the probability of such an event was 1 in 1024 – effectively zero.87 According to the quant’s ‘Value at Risk’ models, the firm was indestructible.

1997年10月,仿佛为了证明长期资本管理公司(LTCM)确实是顶尖的智囊团,默顿和斯科尔斯荣获诺贝尔经济学奖。他们和他们的合伙人如此自信,以至于在1997年12月31日,他们将27亿美元返还给了外部投资者(这强烈暗示他们更愿意专注于投资自己的资金)。88看起来,智力战胜了直觉,火箭科学战胜了风险承担。凭借着他们神奇的“黑匣子”,LTCM的合伙人似乎即将创造连乔治·索罗斯都难以企及的财富。然而,仅仅五个月后,一件大事发生了,险些让诺贝尔奖得主们的“黑匣子”彻底崩塌。股市莫名其妙地下跌,波动率不降反升。波动率越高——6月份达到27,是长期预测值的两倍多——损失就越大。 1998年5月是长期基金有史以来表现最差的一个月:该基金下跌了6.7%。但这仅仅是个开始。6月份,该基金下跌了10.1%。而且,基金资产价值越低,其杠杆率(债务与资本的比率)就越高。6月份,该比率达到了31比1.89

In October 1997, as if to prove that LTCM really was the ultimate Brains Trust, Merton and Scholes were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. So self-confident were they and their partners that on 31 December 1997 they returned $2.7 billion to outside investors (strongly implying that they would much rather focus on investing their own money).88 It seemed as if intellect had triumphed over intuition, rocket science over risk-taking. Equipped with their magic black box, the partners at LTCM seemed poised to make fortunes beyond even George Soros’s wildest dreams. And then, just five months later, something happened that threatened to blow the lid right off the Nobel winners’ black box. For no immediately apparent reason, equity markets dipped, so that volatility went up instead of down. And the higher volatility went – it hit 27 in June, more than double the Long-Term projection – the more money was lost. May 1998 was Long-Term’s worst month ever: the fund dropped by 6.7 per cent. But this was just the beginning. In June it was down 10.1 per cent. And the less the fund’s assets were worth, the higher its leverage – the ratio of debt to capital – rose. In June it hit 31 to 1.89

在进化过程中,大规模物种灭绝往往是由外部冲击造成的,例如小行星撞击地球。1998年7月,一颗巨大的陨石撞击了格林尼治。与此同时,所罗门美邦(Salomon Smith Barney,即被旅行者集团收购后更名的所罗门兄弟公司)宣布关闭其美国债券套利部门。该部门是梅里韦瑟在华尔街声名鹊起的地方,也是长期资本管理公司(LTCM)业务的翻版。交易策略。显然,公司的新东家对自5月份以来持续的亏损感到不满。随后,在1998年8月17日星期一,一颗巨大的“小行星”——并非来自外太空,而是来自地球上最不稳定的新兴市场之一——俄罗斯金融体系崩溃了。由于政治动荡、石油收入下降和私有化失败,俄罗斯金融体系本已脆弱不堪。走投无路的俄罗斯政府被迫违约(包括以卢布计价的国内债券),加剧了全球金融市场的动荡。90前一年的亚洲金融危机之后,俄罗斯的违约对其他新兴市场乃至一些发达市场都产生了连锁反应。信贷利差急剧扩大。*股市暴跌。股票波动率高达29%。峰值达到45%,这意味着未来五年指数每天的波动幅度将达到3%。91这本来不应该发生,至少根据长期风险模型来看是这样。量化分析师曾表示,长期基金单日亏损不太可能超过4500万美元。92 1998年8月21日星期五,该公司亏损了5.5亿美元——占其全部资本的15%,杠杆率飙升至42:1。93格林威治的交易员们目瞪口呆、眼神空洞地盯着屏幕。这不可能是真的。但它确实发生了。突然间,长期基金投资的所有不同市场都同步波动,分散投资带来的保护作用荡然无存。用量化术语来说,相关性已经达到了1。到月底,长期基金的亏损高达44%,总亏损超过18亿美元。94

In evolution, big extinctions tend to be caused by outside shocks, like an asteroid hitting the earth. A large meteor struck Greenwich in July 1998, when it emerged that Salomon Smith Barney (as Salomon Brothers had been renamed following its takeover by Travelers) was closing down its US bond arbitrage group, the place where Meriwether had made his Wall Street reputation, and an outfit that had been virtually replicating LTCM’s trading strategies. Clearly, the firm’s new owners did not like the losses they had been seeing since May. Then, on Monday 17 August 1998, that was followed by a giant asteroid – not from outer space, but from one of earth’s flakiest emerging markets as, weakened by political upheaval, declining oil revenues and a botched privatization, the ailing Russian financial system collapsed. A desperate Russian government was driven to default on its debts (including rouble-denominated domestic bonds), fuelling the fires of volatility throughout the world’s financial markets.90 Coming in the wake of the Asian crisis of the previous year, the Russian default had a contagious effect on other emerging markets, and indeed some developed markets, too. Credit spreads blew out.* Stock markets plunged. Equity volatility hit 29 per cent. At peak it reached 45 per cent, which implied that the indices would move 3 per cent each day for the next five years.91 Now, that just wasn’t supposed to happen, not according to the Long-Term risk models. The quants had said that Long-Term was unlikely to lose more than $45 million in a single day.92 On Friday 21 August 1998, it lost $550 million – 15 per cent of its entire capital, driving its leverage up to 42:1.93 The traders in Greenwich stared, slack-jawed and glassy-eyed, at their screens. It couldn’t be happening. But it was. Suddenly all the different markets where Long-Term had exposure were moving in sync, nullifying the protection offered by diversification. In quant-speak, the correlations had gone to one. By the end of the month, Long-Term was down 44 per cent: a total loss of over $1.8 billion.94

八月通常是金融市场交易清淡的时期,大多数人都外出度假。约翰·梅里韦瑟当时远在地球另一端的北京。他匆匆赶回国,与合伙人拼命寻找救星。他们甚至联系了身在内布拉斯加州奥马哈的沃伦·巴菲特——尽管就在几个月前,长期资本管理公司(LTCM)还在积极做空股票。巴菲特的公司伯克希尔·哈撒韦公司。他拒绝了。8月24日,他们无奈之下只好请求与乔治·索罗斯会面。95简直是奇耻大辱:来自金融星球的量化分析师们竟然向这位信奉非理性、无法量化的反思的地球先知乞求救助。索罗斯回忆说,他“提出如果梅里韦瑟能从其他人那里再筹集5亿美元,他就给梅里韦瑟5亿美元。但这似乎不太可能……”摩根大通提供了2亿美元。高盛也表示愿意提供帮助。但其他公司却按兵不动。他们的交易部门嗅到了血腥味。如果长期基金要破产,他们只想拿回抵押品,而不是收购长期基金的仓位。而且,他们根本不在乎市场波动是否会飙升。最终,由于担心长期投资公司的倒闭可能引发华尔街的全面崩盘,纽约联邦储备银行匆忙斡旋,促成了由14家华尔街银行出资36.25亿美元的救助计划。 96但与此同时,最初的投资者——其中既包括一些上述银行,也包括匹兹堡大学等规模较小的机构——的持股规模却从49亿美元锐减至仅4亿美元。这16位合伙人最终只剩下3000万美元,远低于他们预期的财富。

August is usually a time of thin trading in financial markets. Most people are out of town. John Meriwether was on the other side of the world, in Beijing. Dashing home, he and his partners desperately sought a white knight to rescue them. They tried Warren Buffett in Omaha, Nebraska – despite the fact that just months before LTCM had been aggressively shorting shares in Buffett’s company Berkshire Hathaway. He declined. On 24 August they reluctantly sought a meeting with none other than George Soros.95 It was the ultimate humiliation: the quants from Planet Finance begging for a bail-out from the earthling prophet of irrational, unquantifiable reflexivity. Soros recalls that he ‘offered Meriwether $500 million if he could find another $500 million from someone else. It didn’t seem likely . . .’ JP Morgan offered $200 million. Goldman Sachs also offered to help. But others held back. Their trading desks scented blood. If Long-Term was going bust, they just wanted their collateral, not to buy Long-Term’s positions. And they didn’t give a damn if volatility went through the roof. In the end, fearful that Long-Term’s failure could trigger a generalized meltdown on Wall Street, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York hastily brokered a $3.625 billion bail-out by fourteen Wall Street banks.96 But the original investors – who included some of the self-same banks, but also some smaller players like the University of Pittsburgh – had meanwhile seen their holdings cut from $4.9 billion to just $400 million. The sixteen partners were left with $30 million between them, a fraction of the fortune they had anticipated.

究竟发生了什么?为什么索罗斯的判断如此正确,而长期资本管理公司(LTCM)的那些天才们却错得离谱?部分原因恰恰在于,LTCM的那些“外星人”创始人带着一股“爆炸性”的后果回到了地球。还记得布莱克-斯科尔斯公式的基本假设吗?市场是有效的,这意味着股票价格的走势无法预测;市场是连续的、无摩擦的、完全流动性的;股票收益遵循正态分布(钟形曲线)。可以说,交易员们越是学会运用布莱克-斯科尔斯公式,金融市场的效率就会越高。97但是,正如约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯曾经指出的那样,在危机中,“市场保持非理性的时间可能比你保持偿付能力的时间更长”。从长远来看,世界或许会变得更像金融星球,始终保持冷静的逻辑。但在短期内,它仍然是我们亲爱的地球,居住着情感丰富的人类,他们可能在贪婪和恐惧之间瞬间切换。当损失开始累积时,许多参与者干脆退出了市场。这使得长期资本管理公司(LTCM)的资产组合流动性极差,无论出价多高都无法出售。此外,这是一个日益一体化的地球,俄罗斯的任何违约都可能导致全球市场剧烈波动。迈伦·斯科尔斯在一次采访中沉思道:“或许长期资本管理公司的错误在于……没有意识到世界正变得越来越全球化。”梅里韦瑟也表达了类似的观点:“世界的本质已经改变,而我们却没有意识到这一点。” 98尤其值得注意的是,由于许多其他公司开始试图复制长期资本管理公司的策略,一旦出现问题,受到冲击的不仅仅是长期资本管理公司的投资组合;就好像整个超级投资组合都在遭受重创。99一场如同羊群般的抛售潮席卷而来,各大银行的高管们坚持不惜一切代价平仓。一切都突然同时崩盘。正如一位伦敦顶尖对冲基金经理后来对梅里韦瑟所说:“约翰,你就是相关性。”

What had happened? Why was Soros so right and the giant brains at Long-Term so wrong? Part of the problem was precisely that LTCM’s extraterrestrial founders had come back down to Planet Earth with a bang. Remember the assumptions underlying the Black–Scholes formula? Markets are efficient, meaning that the movement of stock prices cannot be predicted; they are continuous, frictionless and completely liquid; and returns on stocks follow the normal, bell-curve distribution. Arguably, the more traders learned to employ the Black–Scholes formula, the more efficient financial markets would become.97 But, as John Maynard Keynes once observed, in a crisis ‘markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent’. In the long term, it might be true that the world would become more like Planet Finance, always coolly logical. Short term, it was still dear old Planet Earth, inhabited by emotional human beings, capable of flipping suddenly from greed to fear. When losses began to mount, many participants simply withdrew from the market, leaving LTCM with a largely illiquid portfolio of assets that couldn’t be sold at any price. Moreover, this was an ever more integrated Planet Earth, in which a default in Russia could cause volatility to spike all over the world. ‘Maybe the error of Long Term’, mused Myron Scholes in an interview, ‘was . . . that of not realizing that the world is becoming more and more global over time.’ Meriwether echoed this view: ‘The nature of the world had changed, and we hadn’t recognized it.’98 In particular, because many other firms had begun trying to copy Long-Term’s strategies, when things went wrong it was not just the Long-Term portfolio that was hit; it was as if an entire super-portfolio was haemorrhaging.99 There was a herd-like stampede for the exits, with senior managers at the big banks insisting that positions be closed down at any price. Everything suddenly went down at once. As one leading London hedge fund manager later put it to Meriwether: ‘John, you were the correlation.’

然而,LTCM失败还有另一个原因。该公司的风险价值(VaR)模型显示,LTCM在8月份遭受的损失极其罕见,几乎不可能发生。但这仅仅是因为这些模型仅使用了五年的数据。如果模型回溯到11年前,就能捕捉到1987年的股市崩盘;如果回溯到80年前,就能捕捉到1917年革命后最后一次大规模的俄罗斯债务违约。出生于1947年的梅里韦瑟本人也曾懊悔地表示:“如果我经历过大萧条,就能更好地理解当时的局势。” 100坦率地说,诺贝尔奖得主们精通数学,却对历史一无所知。他们理解了金融星球的精妙理论,却忽略了地球混乱的历史。简而言之,这就是长期资本管理最终变成短期资本管理不善的原因。

There was, however, another reason why LTCM failed. The firm’s value at risk (VaR) models had implied that the loss Long-Term suffered in August was so unlikely that it ought never to have happened in the entire life of the universe. But that was because the models were working with just five years’ worth of data. If the models had gone back even eleven years, they would have captured the 1987 stock market crash. If they had gone back eighty years they would have captured the last great Russian default, after the 1917 Revolution. Meriwether himself, born in 1947, ruefully observed: ‘If I had lived through the Depression, I would have been in a better position to understand events.’100 To put it bluntly, the Nobel prize winners had known plenty of mathematics, but not enough history. They had understood the beautiful theory of Planet Finance, but overlooked the messy past of Planet Earth. And that, put very simply, was why Long-Term Capital Management ended up being Short-Term Capital Mismanagement.


人们或许会认为,在长期资本管理公司(LTCM)惨败之后,量化对冲基金会从金融领域消失。毕竟,尽管规模惊人,但对冲基金的失败并非个例。1989年至1996年间成立的1308家对冲基金中,超过三分之一(36.7%)在期末已不复存在。在此期间,对冲基金的平均寿命仅为40个月。然而,情况却恰恰相反。过去十年,各类对冲基金的数量和管理资产规模不仅没有减少,反而呈爆炸式增长。据对冲基金研究公司(Hedge Fund Research)的数据显示, 1990年,对冲基金数量略超过600家,管理资产约390亿美元。到2000年,对冲基金数量增至3873家,资产规模达4900亿美元。最新数据(2008年第一季度)显示,对冲基金总数达到7601家,资产规模达1.9万亿美元。自1998年以来,对冲基金(以及汇集多家公司业绩的“基金中的基金”)的投资热潮席卷全球。曾经,对冲基金是“高净值”人士和投资银行的专属领域,如今,越来越多的养老基金和大学捐赠基金也开始涉足其中。102鉴于对冲基金的损耗率仍然居高不下,这一趋势就显得更加引人注目;1996年公布业绩的600家基金中,到2004年底仅有四分之一仍在运营。2006年,717家停止交易;2007年前九个月,又有409家停止交易。 103人们普遍没有意识到,大量对冲基金最终只是因为未能达到投资者的预期而销声匿迹。

It might be assumed that after the catastrophic failure of LTCM, quantitative hedge funds would have vanished from the financial scene. After all, the failure, though spectacular in scale, was far from anomalous. Of 1,308 hedge funds that were formed between 1989 and 1996, more than a third (36.7 per cent) had ceased to exist by the end of the period. In that period the average life span of a hedge fund was just forty months.101 Yet the very reverse has happened. Far from declining, in the past ten years hedge funds of every type have exploded in number and in the volume of assets they manage. In 1990, according to Hedge Fund Research, there were just over 600 hedge funds managing some $39 billion in assets. By 2000 there were 3,873 funds with $490 billion in assets. The latest figures (for the first quarter of 2008) put the total at 7,601 funds with $1.9 trillion in assets. Since 1998 there has been a veritable stampede to invest in hedge funds (and in the ‘funds of funds’ that aggregate the performance of multiple firms). Where once they were the preserve of ‘high net worth’ individuals and investment banks, hedge funds are now attracting growing numbers of pension funds and university endowments.102 This trend is all the more striking given that the attrition rate remains high; only a quarter of the 600 funds reporting in 1996 still existed at the end of 2004. In 2006, 717 ceased to trade; in the first nine months of 2007, 409.103 It is not widely recognized that large numbers of hedge funds simply fizzle out, having failed to meet investors’ expectations.

对冲基金数量激增的最直接解释是,它们作为一种资产类别表现相对较好,波动性较低,与其他投资工具的相关性也较低。但据对冲基金研究公司(Hedge Fund Research)的数据显示,对冲基金的回报率一直在下降,从20世纪90年代的18%降至2000年至2006年间的7.5%。此外,人们越来越怀疑对冲基金的回报是否真正反映了“阿尔法”(资产管理技巧),而不是“贝塔”(可以通过适当的指数组合捕捉到的整体市场波动)。 104另一种解释是,对冲基金的存在使其管理者以一种独特而诱人的方式致富。2007年,乔治·索罗斯的收益为29亿美元,超过了城堡投资集团的肯·格里芬和文艺复兴科技公司的詹姆斯·西蒙斯,但低于约翰·保尔森,后者通过做空对冲基金赚取了惊人的37亿美元。次级抵押贷款。正如约翰·凯所指出的,如果沃伦·巴菲特向伯克希尔·哈撒韦公司的投资者收取“2%加20%”的费用,那么在过去42年中,他公司为股东创造的620亿美元利润中,他将有570亿美元落入自己口袋。105索罗斯、格里芬和西蒙斯显然都是杰出的基金经理(当然,肯定不如巴菲特)。这解释了为什么他们的基金以及其他表现优异的基金在过去十年中取得了巨大的增长。如今,约有390只基金的管理资产超过10亿美元。排名前100位的基金目前占所有对冲基金资产的75%;仅排名前十的基金就管理着3240亿美元的资产。 106但一个平庸的骗子也可以通过设立对冲基金,从容易上当的投资者那里骗取1亿美元,然后实施最简单的策略来赚取一大笔钱:

The obvious explanation for this hedge fund population explosion is that they perform relatively well as an asset class, with relatively low volatility and low correlation to other investment vehicles. But the returns on hedge funds, according to Hedge Fund Research, have been falling, from 18 per cent in the 1990s to just 7.5 per cent between 2000 and 2006. Moreover, there is increasing scepticism that hedge fund returns truly reflect ‘alpha’ (skill of asset management) as opposed to ‘beta’ (general market movements that could be captured with an appropriate mix of indices).104 An alternative explanation is that, while they exist, hedge funds enrich their managers in a uniquely alluring way. In 2007 George Soros made $2.9 billion, ahead of Ken Griffin of Citadel and James Simons of Renaissance, but behind John Paulson, who earned a staggering $3.7 billion from his bets against subprime mortgages. As John Kay has pointed out, if Warren Buffett had charged investors in Berkshire Hathaway ‘2 and 20’, he would have kept for himself $57 billion of the $62 billion his company has made for its shareholders over the past forty-two years.105 Soros, Griffin and Simons are clearly exceptional fund managers (though surely not more so than Buffett). This explains why their funds, along with other superior performers, have grown enormously over the past decade. Today around 390 funds have assets under management in excess of $1 billion. The top hundred now account for 75 per cent of all hedge fund assets; and the top ten alone manage $324 billion.106 But a quite mediocre conman could make a good deal of money by setting up a hedge fund, taking $100 million off gullible investors and running the simplest possible strategy:

  1. 他将1亿美元投资于收益率为4%的一年期国债。

  2. He parks the $100 million in one-year Treasury bills yielding 4 per cent.

  3. 这样一来,他就可以以每美元 10 美分的价格出售 1 亿美元的备兑期权,如果标普 500 指数在未来一年内下跌超过 20%,这些期权将支付收益。

  4. This then allows him to sell for 10 cents on the dollar 100 million covered options, which will pay out if the S&P 500 falls by more than 20 per cent in the coming year.

  5. 他用出售期权所得的 1000 万美元购买了更多国库券,这使他能够再出售 1000 万份期权,从而又净赚 100 万美元。

  6. He takes the $10 million from the sale of the options and buys some more Treasury bills, which enables him to sell another 10 million options, which nets him another $1 million.

  7. 然后他休了个长假。

  8. He then takes a long vacation.

  9. 到年底,标普 500 指数下跌 20% 的概率为 90%,因此他无需向期权持有人支付任何款项。

  10. At the end of the year the probability is 90 per cent that the S&P 500 has not fallen by 20 per cent, so he owes the option-holders nothing.

  11. 他将自己的收入加起来——出售期权所得 1100 万美元,加上 1.1 亿美元国库券的 4% 收益——扣除费用前,回报率高达 15.4%。

  12. He adds up his earnings – $11 million from the sale of the options plus 4 per cent on the $110 million of T-bills – a handsome return of 15.4 per cent before expenses.

  13. 他从管理的资金中抽取 2%(200 万美元),并从高于基准收益率(例如 4%)的收益中抽取 20%,总计超过 400 万美元。

  14. He pockets 2 per cent of the funds under management ($2 million) and 20 per cent of the returns above, say, a 4 per cent benchmark, which comes to over $4 million gross.

  15. 如果标普500指数没有下跌20%,该基金在此基础上平稳运行五年以上的概率接近60%。在这种情况下,即使没有新的资金流入,即使不使用杠杆,他也能获得1500万美元的收益。107

  16. The chances are nearly 60 per cent that the fund will run smoothly on this basis for more than five years without the S&P 500 falling by 20 per cent, in which case he makes $15 million even if no new money comes into his fund, and even without leveraging his positions.107

十年后的今天,LTCM式的危机是否会重演?只是这一次规模更大,涉及的虚假对冲基金数量更多,以至于根本无法救助?西方世界的银行现在是否比1998年更容易受到对冲基金损失及相关交易对手风险的影响?*如果真是如此,那么这一次谁来拯救它们?这些问题的答案不在另一个星球,而是在我们这个星球的另一端。

Could an LTCM-style crisis replay itself today, ten years on – only this time on such a scale, and involving so many such bogus hedge funds, that it would simply be too big to bail out? Are the banks of the Western world now even more exposed to hedge fund losses, and related counterparty risks, than they were in 1998?* And, if they are, then who will bail them out this time around? The answers to those questions lie not on another planet, but on the other side of this one.

奇美利加

Chimerica

对许多人来说,金融史不过是过眼云烟——如同遥远的古代史,就像中国古代史一样。市场记忆短暂。如今许多年轻的交易员甚至没有经历过1997-1998年的亚洲金融危机。2000年后进入金融行业的人则经历了七年的繁荣时期。全球股市、债券市场、大宗商品市场和衍生品市场都蓬勃发展。事实上,所有资产类别都如此——更不用说那些在高额奖金时受益的资产了,从年份波尔多葡萄酒到豪华游艇。但这些繁荣时期也充满了谜团,市场飙升的同时,短期利率却在上升,贸易失衡日益严重,政治风险也在飙升,尤其是在世界经济中至关重要的石油出口地区。解开这一看似矛盾的谜团的关键就在于中国。108

To many, financial history is just so much water under the bridge – ancient history, like the history of imperial China. Markets have short memories. Many young traders today did not even experience the Asian crisis of 1997–8. Those who went into finance after 2000 lived through seven heady years. Stock markets the world over boomed. So did bond markets, commodity markets and derivatives markets. In fact, so did all asset classes – not to mention those that benefit when bonuses are big, from vintage Bordeaux to luxury yachts. But these boom years were also mystery years, when markets soared at a time of rising short-term interest rates, glaring trade imbalances and soaring political risk, particularly in the economically crucial, oil-exporting regions of the world. The key to this seeming paradox lay in China.108

重庆,坐落在雄伟的长江两岸,地处中国腹地,距离西方游客常去的沿海经济特区有千余公里。然而,重庆3200万居民与香港或上海的居民一样,都沉浸在当今的经济奇迹之中。从某种程度上说,重庆正在经历的飞速工业化和城市化,是共产主义计划经济的最后也是最伟大的成就。三十座桥梁、十条轻轨、无数高楼大厦,在雾霾中若隐若现,仿佛是中央集权一党专政的丰碑。然而,重庆的崛起也离不开自由发展的私营企业。从很多方面来看,吴亚军就是中国新财富的化身。作为重庆顶尖的房地产开发商之一,她跻身中国最富有的女性之列,身价超过90亿美元——这与一个世纪前在香港发迹的苏格兰人形成了鲜明的对比。再比如尹明山。尹先生在文化大革命期间被监禁,直到上世纪90年代初中国经济自由化后才找到了自己的真正使命。短短十五年间,他便打造了一个价值9亿美元的商业帝国。去年,他的力帆公司售出了超过150万台摩托车发动机和整车;如今,他的产品已出口到美国和欧洲。吴先生和尹先生只是目前居住在中国的34.5万多名百万美元富翁中的两位。

Chongqing, on the undulating banks of the mighty earth-brown River Yangtze, is deep in the heart of the Middle Kingdom, over a thousand miles from the coastal enterprise zones most Westerners visit. Yet the province’s 32 million inhabitants are as much caught up in today’s economic miracle as those in Hong Kong or Shanghai. At one level, the breakneck industrialization and urbanization going on in Chongqing are the last and greatest feat of the Communist planned economy. The thirty bridges, the ten light railways, the countless tower blocks all appear through the smog like monuments to the power of the centralized one-party state. Yet the growth of Chongqing is also the result of unfettered private enterprise. In many ways, Wu Yajun is the personification of China’s newfound wealth. As one of Chongqing’s leading property developers, she is among the wealthiest women in China, worth over $9 billion – the living antithesis of those Scotsmen who made their fortunes in Hong Kong a century ago. Or take Yin Mingshan. Imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution, Mr Yin discovered his true vocation in the early 1990s, after the liberalization of the Chinese economy. In just fifteen years he has built up a $900 million business. Last year his Lifan company sold more than 1.5 million motorcycle engines and bikes; now he is exporting to the United States and Europe. Wu and Yin are just two of more than 345,000 dollar millionaires who now live in China.

中国不仅早已彻底摆脱了帝国主义的过去,而且迄今为止,作为全球增长最快的经济体,中国也成功避免了其他新兴市场周期性爆发的那种危机。早在1994年人民币贬值之后,中国就在整个经济改革时期维持着资本管制,因此在1997-1998年并未遭遇货币危机。当中国想要吸引外资时,他们坚持采用直接投资的形式。这意味着,与其他许多新兴市场通过向西方银行贷款来为工业发展融资不同,中国让外国企业在中国的企业园区内建厂——这些大型、固定资产难以撤出。在危机时期。然而,关键在于,中国的大部分投资都来自中国自身的储蓄(以及海外华人)。经历了多年的动荡,加上不习惯西方那样丰富的信贷渠道,中国家庭的储蓄率异常高,这与近年来几乎没有储蓄的美国人形成了鲜明对比。中国企业的储蓄率甚至更高,占其利润飙升的比例更高。储蓄如此充裕,以至于几个世纪以来,资本流动的方向首次不再是从西方流向东方,而是从东方流向西方。而且,这是一股巨大的资本流动。2007年,美国需要从世界其他地区借款约8000亿美元,相当于每个工作日超过40亿美元。相比之下,中国经常账户盈余高达2620亿美元,相当于美国赤字的四分之一以上。而这笔盈余中相当大一部分最终流向了美国。实际上,中华人民共和国已经成为美国的银行家。

Not only has China left its imperial past far behind. So far, the fastest growing economy in the world has also managed to avoid the kind of crisis that has periodically blown up other emerging markets. Having already devalued the renminbi in 1994, and having retained capital controls throughout the period of economic reform, China suffered no currency crisis in 1997–8. When the Chinese wanted to attract foreign capital, they insisted that it take the form of direct investment. That meant that instead of borrowing from Western banks to finance their industrial development, as many other emerging markets did, they got foreigners to build factories in Chinese enterprise zones – large, lumpy assets that could not easily be withdrawn in a crisis. The crucial point, though, is that the bulk of Chinese investment has been financed from China’s own savings (and from the overseas Chinese diaspora). Cautious after years of instability and unused to the panoply of credit facilities we have in the West, Chinese households save an unusually high proportion of their rising incomes, in marked contrast to Americans, who in recent years have saved almost none at all. Chinese corporations save an even larger proportion of their soaring profits. So plentiful are savings that, for the first time in centuries, the direction of capital flow is now not from West to East, but from East to West. And it is a mighty flow. In 2007, the United States needed to borrow around $800 billion from the rest of the world; more than $4 billion every working day. China, by contrast, ran a current account surplus of $262 billion, equivalent to more than a quarter of the US deficit. And a remarkably large proportion of that surplus has ended up being lent to the United States. In effect, the People’s Republic China has become banker to the United States of America.

乍一看,这似乎匪夷所思。如今,美国人均年收入超过34,000美元。尽管像吴亚军和尹明山这样的人拥有巨额财富,但中国人均年收入却不足2,000美元。那么,中国人为何要借钱给比自己富裕22倍的人呢?答案是,直到最近,中国安置其庞大人口的最佳途径还是向挥金如土的美国消费者出口制成品。为了确保这些出口商品价格低廉,中国不得不通过在国际市场上购买数十亿美元的美元来对抗人民币对美元升值的趋势——这是亚洲货币挂钩体系的一部分,一些评论员将其称为“布雷顿森林体系二期”。 109 2006年,中国持有的美元几乎肯定超过了万亿美元大关。 (值得注意的是,中国外汇储备净增长几乎与美国国债和政府机构债券的净发行量完全一致。)与此同时,从美国的角度来看,近年来保持经济繁荣的最佳方法是……进口廉价的中国商品。此外,通过将制造业外包给中国,美国企业也得以享受廉价劳动力带来的好处。而且,至关重要的是,通过向中国人民银行出售数十亿美元的债券,美国得以享受远低于其他情况下的利率。

At first sight, it may seem bizarre. Today the average American earns more than $34,000 a year. Despite the wealth of people like Wu Yajun and Yin Mingshan, the average Chinese lives on less than $2,000. Why would the latter want, in effect, to lend money to the former, who is twenty-two times richer? The answer is that, until recently, the best way for China to employ its vast population was through exporting manufactures to the insatiably spendthrift US consumer. To ensure that those exports were irresistibly cheap, China had to fight the tendency for the Chinese currency to strengthen against the dollar by buying literally billions of dollars on world markets – part of a system of Asian currency pegs that some commentators dubbed Bretton Woods II.109 In 2006 Chinese holdings of dollars almost certainly passed the trillion dollar mark. (Significantly, the net increase of China’s foreign exchange reserves almost exactly matched the net issuance of US Treasury and government agency bonds.) From America’s point of view, meanwhile, the best way of keeping the good times rolling in recent years has been to import cheap Chinese goods. Moreover, by out-sourcing manufacturing to China, US corporations have been able to reap the benefits of cheap labour, too. And, crucially, by selling billions of dollars of bonds to the People’s Bank of China, the United States has been able to enjoy significantly lower interest rates than would otherwise have been the case.

欢迎来到奇妙的“中美”双国——中国加美国——它占世界陆地面积的十分之一多一点,人口的四分之一,经济产出的三分之一,以及过去八年全球经济增长的一半以上。一度,这似乎是天作之合。东中美人负责储蓄,西中美人负责消费。中国的进口抑制了美国的通货膨胀,中国的储蓄抑制了美国的利率,中国的劳动力抑制了美国的工资成本。因此,借贷成本极低,经营企业利润也异常丰厚。得益于中美,全球实际利率——扣除通货膨胀后的借贷成本——下降了超过三分之一。低于过去十五年的平均水平。得益于中美关系,2006年美国企业利润的增长幅度与占GDP平均水平的增幅大致相同。但这其中存在一个问题。中国越愿意向美国贷款,美国人就越愿意借贷。换句话说,中美关系是2000年后“金融星球”(Planet Finance)所见证的银行贷款、债券发行和新衍生品合约激增的根本原因。它也是对冲基金数量爆炸式增长的根本原因。它还是私募股权合伙企业能够四处借贷以进行杠杆收购的根本原因。而中美关系——或者如本·伯南克所称的亚洲“储蓄过剩”——也是2006年美国抵押贷款市场资金如此充裕的根本原因,以至于即使没有收入、没有工作、没有资产,也能获得100%的抵押贷款。

Welcome to the wonderful dual country of ‘Chimerica’ – China plus America – which accounts for just over a tenth of the world’s land surface, a quarter of its population, a third of its economic output and more than half of global economic growth in the past eight years. For a time it seemed like a marriage made in heaven. The East Chimericans did the saving. The West Chimericans did the spending. Chinese imports kept down US inflation. Chinese savings kept down US interest rates. Chinese labour kept down US wage costs. As a result, it was remarkably cheap to borrow money and remarkably profitable to run a corporation. Thanks to Chimerica, global real interest rates – the cost of borrowing, after inflation – sank by more than a third below their average over the past fifteen years. Thanks to Chimerica, US corporate profits in 2006 rose by about the same proportion above their average share of GDP. But there was a catch. The more China was willing to lend to the United States, the more Americans were willing to borrow. Chimerica, in other words, was the underlying cause of the surge in bank lending, bond issuance and new derivative contracts that Planet Finance witnessed after 2000. It was the underlying cause of the hedge fund population explosion. It was the underlying reason why private equity partnerships were able to borrow money left, right and centre to finance leveraged buyouts. And Chimerica – or the Asian ‘savings glut’, as Ben Bernanke called it110 – was the underlying reason why the US mortgage market was so awash with cash in 2006 that you could get a 100 per cent mortgage with no income, no job or assets.

正如我们已经看到的,2007年的次贷危机并不难预测。真正难以预料的是,美国本土新兴市场(美国)的一系列抵押贷款违约引发的震荡,竟会在整个西方金融体系中造成一场金融地震。当时很少有人意识到,次级抵押贷款违约会摧毁诸如担保债务凭证(CDO)等新型资产支持工具的价值。也很少有人预见到,随着损失规模的飙升,银行间贷款会彻底停滞,短期商业票据和公司债券的发行利率会大幅上涨,导致各类私营部门借款人遭受沉重打击。更很少有人预料到,这场信贷紧缩会导致一家英国银行遭遇自1866年以来的首次挤兑,最终被国有化。早在2007年7月,危机爆发之前,一位美国对冲基金经理曾与我打赌,赔率为7比1,赌美国未来五年不会出现经济衰退。 “我当时打赌世界末日不会到来,”六个月后他承认道,“我们输了。” 诚然,到2008年5月底,美国经济衰退似乎已经开始。但世界末日?

The subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 was not so difficult to predict, as we have already seen. What was much harder to predict was the way a tremor caused by a spate of mortgage defaults in America’s very own, home-grown emerging market would cause a financial earthquake right across the Western financial system. Not many people understood that defaults on subprime mortgages would destroy the value of exotic new asset-backed instruments like collateralized debt obligations. Not many people saw that, as the magnitude of these losses soared, interbank lending would simply seize up, and that the interest rates charged to issuers of short-term commercial paper and corporate bonds would leap upwards, leading to a painful squeeze for all kinds of private sector borrowers. Not many people foresaw that this credit crunch would cause a British bank to suffer the first run since 1866 and end up being nationalized. Back in July 2007, before the trouble started, one American hedge fund manager had bet me 7 to 1 that there would be no recession in the United States in the next five years. ‘I bet that the world wasn’t going to come to an end,’ he admitted six months later. ‘We lost.’ Certainly, by the end of May 2008, a US recession seemed already to have begun. But the end of the world?

诚然,在2008年5月,中国(更不用说其他金砖国家)似乎不太可能完全不受美国经济衰退的影响。美国仍然是中国最大的贸易伙伴,约占中国出口总额的五分之一。另一方面,近年来净出口对中国经济增长的重要性已大幅下降。此外,中国外汇储备的积累使北京拥有了强大的实力,能够向陷入困境的美国银行注入资金。对冲基金的兴起只是1998年后全球金融格局重塑的一部分。更重要的是主权财富基金的增长,这些基金由拥有巨额贸易顺差的国家设立,用于管理其不断积累的财富。到2007年底,主权财富基金的管理规模约为2.6万亿美元,超过了全球所有对冲基金的总和,与政府养老基金和央行储备也相差无几。摩根士丹利预测,十五年后,这些主权财富基金的资产规模可能达到27万亿美元——略高于全球金融资产总额的9%。早在2007年,亚洲和中东的主权财富基金就已开始投资西方金融公司,包括巴克莱银行、贝尔斯登、花旗集团、美林证券、摩根士丹利、瑞银集团以及私募股权公司黑石集团和凯雷集团。一度,主权财富基金似乎要主导一场全球性的西方金融救助行动,这在金融史上可谓是角色大反转。对于那些被乔治·索罗斯斥为“市场原教旨主义”的拥护者来说,这是一个令人痛心的反常现象:在最近这场危机中,最大的赢家竟然是国有企业

True, it seemed unlikely in May 2008 that China (to say nothing of the other BRICs) would be left wholly unscathed by an American recession. The United States remains China’s biggest trading partner, accounting for around a fifth of Chinese exports. On the other hand, the importance of net exports to Chinese growth has declined considerably in recent years.111 Moreover, Chinese reserve accumulation has put Beijing in the powerful position of being able to offer capital injections to struggling American banks. The rise of the hedge funds was only a part of the story of the post-1998 reorientation of global finance. Even more important was the growth of sovereign wealth funds, entities created by countries running large trade surpluses to manage their accumulating wealth. By the end of 2007 sovereign wealth funds had around $2.6 trillion under management, more than all the world’s hedge funds, and not far behind government pension funds and central bank reserves. According to a forecast by Morgan Stanley, within fifteen years they could end up with assets of $27 trillion – just over 9 per cent of total global financial assets. Already in 2007, Asian and Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds had moved to invest in Western financial companies, including Barclays, Bear Stearns, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, UBS and the private equity firms Blackstone and Carlyle. For a time it seemed as if the sovereign wealth funds might orchestrate a global bail-out of Western finance; the ultimate role reversal in financial history. For the proponents of what George Soros has disparaged as ‘market fundamentalism’, here was a painful anomaly: among the biggest winners of the latest crisis were state-owned entities.*

然而,这种看似优雅且极具中美特色的美国危机解决方案之所以未能实现,是有原因的。部分原因在于,中国最初进军美国金融股的尝试并未取得预期成效。卓越的成果。*北京方面有理由担心,西方银行业最糟糕的情况可能尚未到来,尤其考虑到美国经济衰退对名义价值高达62万亿美元的未偿信用违约互换的影响难以估量。但中美关系的核心地带也出现了严重的政治紧张局势。一段时间以来,美国国会越来越关注中国所谓的“不公平竞争”和“货币操纵”,而美国经济衰退越严重,这种抱怨的声音可能就越大。然而,自2007年8月以来,美国的货币宽松政策——联邦基金利率大幅下调至接近零,以及各种“拍卖机制”向银行体系注入超过1万亿美元——实际上相当于美国版的货币操纵。112在危机的第一阶段,美元对其主要贸易伙伴的货币贬值了约25%,其中对人民币贬值了9%。由于这与几乎所有大宗商品市场同时出现的供需压力不谋而合,导致食品、燃料和原材料价格大幅飙升。反过来,大宗商品价格上涨加剧了中国的通胀压力,迫使中国实施价格管制和出口禁令,并引发了对非洲和其他地区自然资源的异常争夺,在西方看来,这带有令人不安的帝国主义色彩。 113 2008 年末,美元走强、大宗商品价格暴跌,这些趋势虽然有所逆转,但并未缓解摩擦。事实上,即便中国对美出口断崖式下跌,美国仍然再次指责中国“操纵汇率”。或许,正如其名称所暗示的那样,“中美关系”只不过是……奇美拉——古代传说中的神话生物,一部分是狮子,一部分是山羊,一部分是龙。

And yet there are reasons why this seemingly elegant, and quintessentially Chimerican, resolution of the American crisis has failed to happen. Part of the reason is simply that the initial Chinese forays into US financial stocks have produced less than stellar results.* There are justifiable fears in Beijing that the worst may be yet to come for Western banks, especially given the unknowable impact of a US recession on outstanding credit default swaps with a notional value of $62 trillion. But there is also a serious political tension now detectable at the very heart of Chimerica. For some time, concern has been mounting in the US Congress about what is seen as unfair competition and currency manipulation by China, and the worse the recession gets in the United States, the louder the complaints are likely to grow. Yet US monetary loosening since August 2007 – the steep cuts in the federal funds rate to nearly zero, the various ‘auction facilities’ that have injected more than a trillion dollars into the banking system – has amounted to an American version of currency manipulation.112 In the first phase of the crisis, the dollar depreciated roughly 25 per cent against the currencies of its major trading partners, including 9 per cent against the renminbi. Because this coincided with simultaneous demand and supply pressures in nearly all markets for commodities, the result was a significant spike in the prices of food, fuel and raw materials. Rising commodity prices, in turn, are intensified inflationary pressures in China, necessitating the imposition of price controls and export prohibitions, and encouraging an extraordinary scramble for natural resources in Africa and elsewhere which, to Western eyes, had an unnervingly imperial undertone.113 The reversal of these trends in late 2008, when the dollar rallied and commodity prices collapsed, did not reduce the friction. Indeed, the US repeated the charge of ‘currency manipulation’ even as China’s exports to America fell off a cliff. Maybe, as its name was always intended to hint, Chimerica is nothing more than a chimera – the mythical beast of ancient legend that was part lion, part goat, part dragon.

或许,仔细想想,我们似曾相识。一百年前,在全球化初期,许多投资者认为世界金融中心英国与欧洲大陆最具活力的工业经济体——德国——之间存在着类似的共生关系。当时,正如今天一样,共生与竞争之间只有一线之隔。114 究竟是什么会引发类似1914年那样的全球化崩溃?显而易见的答案是美中政治关系的恶化,无论是贸易台湾、西藏问题,还是其他一些尚未被察觉的潜在问题。115这种设想或许听起来难以置信。然而,不难想象,未来的历史学家会如何回顾性地构建出看似合理的因果链来解释这种事态发展。“战争罪责论”支持者会将矛头指向一个更加强势的中国,而其他人则会哀叹疲惫不堪的美国巨头的不作为。国际关系学者无疑会将这场战争的系统性根源归咎于自由贸易的崩溃、自然资源的争夺或文明的冲突。用历史解释的语言来包装,一场大规模冲突在我们这个时代似乎变得令人不安地可能发生,正如1914年那样。有些人甚至会认为,2003年至2008年间大宗商品价格的飙升反映了市场对即将到来的冲突的某种无意识预期。

Perhaps, on reflection, we have been here before. A hundred years ago, in the first age of globalization, many investors thought there was a similarly symbiotic relationship between the world’s financial centre, Britain, and continental Europe’s most dynamic industrial economy. That economy was Germany’s. Then, as today, there was a fine line between symbiosis and rivalry.114 Could anything trigger another breakdown of globalization like the one that happened in 1914? The obvious answer is a deterioration of political relations between the United States and China, whether over trade, Taiwan, Tibet or some other as yet subliminal issue.115 The scenario may seem implausible. Yet it is easy to see how future historians could retrospectively construct plausible chains of causation to explain such a turn of events. The advocates of ‘war guilt’ would blame a more assertive China, leaving others to lament the sins of omission of a weary American titan. Scholars of international relations would no doubt identify the systemic origins of the war in the breakdown of free trade, the competition for natural resources or the clash of civilizations. Couched in the language of historical explanation, a major conflagration can start to seem unnervingly probable in our time, just as it turned out to be in 1914. Some may even be tempted to say that the surge of commodity prices in the period from 2003 until 2008 reflected some unconscious market anticipation of the coming conflict.

历史的一个重要教训是,即使经济全球化发展到很高的程度,英语帝国的霸权地位看似稳固,重大战争仍然可能爆发。第二个重要的教训是,世界越久没有发生重大冲突,人们就越难想象(或许也越容易发动)。第三个也是最后一个教训是,危机袭击那些安于现状的投资者,造成的破坏远比袭击那些身经百战的投资者要大得多。正如我们反复看到的那样,真正的大危机发生的频率恰好低到足以让当今的银行家们记忆犹新。高管、基金经理和交易员。华尔街首席执行官的平均职业生涯仅略超过25年,这意味着美国银行业高层的第一手记忆无法追溯到1983年之前——也就是上一次石油和黄金价格大涨开始的十年之后。仅一点就足以充分证明研究金融史的必要性。

One important lesson of history is that major wars can arise even when economic globalization is very far advanced and the hegemonic position of an English-speaking empire seems fairly secure. A second important lesson is that the longer the world goes without a major conflict, the harder one becomes to imagine (and, perhaps, the easier one becomes to start). A third and final lesson is that when a crisis strikes complacent investors it causes much more disruption than when it strikes battle-scarred ones. As we have seen repeatedly, the really big crises come just seldom enough to be beyond the living memory of today’s bank executives, fund managers and traders. The average career of a Wall Street CEO is just over twenty-five years,116 which means that first-hand memories at the top of the US banking system do not extend back beyond 1983 – ten years after the beginning of the last great surge in oil and gold prices. That fact alone provides a powerful justification for the study of financial history.

7

7

货币的衰落

The Descent of Money

当今的金融世界是四千年经济演进的产物。货币——债务人和债权人之间固化的关系——催生了银行,银行作为清算机构,处理着规模日益庞大的借贷交易。从十三世纪开始,政府债券引入了利息支付证券化;债券市场也展现了受监管的公开市场在证券交易和定价方面的优势。从十七世纪开始,公司股权也可以以类似的方式买卖。从十八世纪开始,保险基金,以及后来的养老基金,利用规模经济和平均法则,为人们提供抵御可计算风险的金融保障。从十九世纪开始,期货和期权提供了更加专业和复杂的金融工具:最早的衍生品。而从二十世纪开始,出于政治原因,人们被鼓励提高杠杆率,并将投资组合向房地产倾斜。

Today’s financial world is the result of four millennia of economic evolution. Money – the crystallized relationship between debtor and creditor – begat banks, clearing houses for ever larger aggregations of borrowing and lending. From the thirteenth century onwards, government bonds introduced the securitization of streams of interest payments; while bond markets revealed the benefits of regulated public markets for trading and pricing securities. From the seventeenth century, equity in corporations could be bought and sold in similar ways. From the eighteenth century, insurance funds and then pension funds exploited economies of scale and the laws of averages to provide financial protection against calculable risk. From the nineteenth, futures and options offered more specialized and sophisticated instruments: the first derivatives. And, from the twentieth, households were encouraged, for political reasons, to increase leverage and skew their portfolios in favour of real estate.

那些融合了所有这些制度创新——银行、债券市场、股票市场、保险和财产所有制民主——的经济体,从长远来看,表现优于那些没有融合这些创新的经济体,因为金融中介通常比封建制度或中央计划等制度更能有效地配置资源。因此,西方金融模式在全球范围内传播也就不足为奇了,它最初以帝国主义的面目出现,后来又以全球化的面目出现。 1 从古代美索不达米亚到今天的中国,简而言之,货币的崛起一直是人类进步的驱动力之一:这是一个复杂的创新、中介和整合过程,其重要性不亚于科学的进步或法律的传播,它使人类摆脱了自给自足农业的苦役和马尔萨斯陷阱的困境。正如前美联储理事弗雷德里克·米什金所言,“金融体系是经济的大脑……它发挥着协调机制的作用,将作为经济活动命脉的资本分配给企业和家庭最有效的用途。如果资本流向错误的方向或根本不流动,经济运行效率就会低下,最终导致经济增长缓慢。” ²

Economies that combined all these institutional innovations – banks, bond markets, stock markets, insurance and property-owning democracy – performed better over the long run than those that did not, because financial intermediation generally permits a more efficient allocation of resources than, say, feudalism or central planning. For this reason, it is not wholly surprising that the Western financial model tended to spread around the world, first in the guise of imperialism, then in the guise of globalization.1 From ancient Mesopotamia to present-day China, in short, the ascent of money has been one of the driving forces behind human progress: a complex process of innovation, intermediation and integration that has been as vital as the advance of science or the spread of law in mankind’s escape from the drudgery of subsistence agriculture and the misery of the Malthusian trap. In the words of former Federal Reserve Governor Frederic Mishkin, ‘the financial system [is] the brain of the economy . . . It acts as a coordinating mechanism that allocates capital, the lifeblood of economic activity, to its most productive uses by businesses and households. If capital goes to the wrong uses or does not flow at all, the economy will operate inefficiently, and ultimately economic growth will be low.’2

然而,货币的增长并非一帆风顺,也永远不可能一帆风顺。恰恰相反,金融史就像过山车一样,充满了起伏跌宕、泡沫破裂、狂热恐慌、冲击和崩盘。一项近期对1870年以来国内生产总值和消费数据的研究表明,历史上曾发生过148次危机,在这些危机中,一个国家的国内生产总值累计下降至少10%;另有87次危机,在这些危机中,消费也经历了类似幅度的下降,这意味着每年发生金融灾难的概率约为3.6%。即使在今天,尽管我们的制度和工具空前完善,金融世界仍然像以往一样容易受到危机的影响。看来,尽管我们拥有各种智慧,却仍然注定要“被随机性所愚弄” ,并被“黑天鹅”事件所震惊。6甚至有可能,我们现在正经历着持续数十年的“超级泡沫”痛苦破裂的过程。7

Yet money’s ascent has not been, and can never be, a smooth one. On the contrary, financial history is a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs, bubbles and busts, manias and panics, shocks and crashes.3 One recent study of the available data for gross domestic product and consumption since 1870 has identified 148 crises in which a country experienced a cumulative decline in GDP of at least 10 per cent and eighty-seven crises in which consumption suffered a fall of comparable magnitude, implying a probability of financial disaster of around 3.6 per cent per year.4 Even today, despite the unprecedented sophistication of our institutions and instruments, Planet Finance turns out to be as vulnerable as ever to crises. It seems that, for all our ingenuity, we are doomed to be ‘fooled by randomness’5 and surprised by ‘black swans’.6 It may even be that we are now living through the painful deflation of a multi-decade ‘super bubble’.7

这主要有三个原因。首先,关于未来——或者更确切地说,是关于未来们,因为未来从来都不是单一的——很多方面都属于不确定性的范畴,而非可计算的风险。正如弗兰克·奈特在1921年所论述的:“不确定性必须从与我们熟知的风险概念截然不同的角度来看待,两者从未真正分离……可衡量的不确定性,或者说真正的‘风险’……与不可衡量的不确定性截然不同,以至于后者实际上根本就不是不确定性。” 简而言之,生活中发生的很多事情并非如此。就像掷骰子一样。总会反复出现这样的事件:“它是如此独特,以至于没有其他类似事件,或者类似事件的数量不足以让我们统计出足够多的类似事件,从而为任何真实概率的推断提供基础……” 8凯恩斯在1937年也精辟地表达了同样的观点。他在回应《通论》的批评者时写道:“通过‘不确定’的知识,

There are three fundamental reasons for this. The first is that so much about the future – or, rather, futures, since there is never a singular future – lies in the realm of uncertainty, as opposed to calculable risk. As Frank Knight argued in 1921, ‘Uncertainty must be taken in a sense radically distinct from the familiar notion of Risk, from which it has never been properly separated . . . A measurable uncertainty, or “risk” proper . . . is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all.’ To put it simply, much of what happens in life isn’t like a game of dice. Again and again an event will occur that is ‘so entirely unique that there are no others or not a sufficient number to make it possible to tabulate enough like it to form a basis for any inference of value about any real probability . . .’8 The same point was brilliantly expressed by Keynes in 1937. ‘By “uncertain” knowledge,’ he wrote in a response to critics of his General Theory,

……我并非仅仅指区分确定无疑的事实和仅仅是可能发生的事情。从这个意义上讲,轮盘赌游戏并不存在不确定性……预期寿命的不确定性微乎其微。就连天气也只是中等程度的不确定性。我使用“不确定性”一词的含义是指,欧洲战争的前景是不确定的,或者……二十年后的利率是不确定的……关于这些问题,没有任何科学依据可以得出任何可计算的概率。我们根本不知道。*

. . . I do not mean merely to distinguish what is known for certain from what is only probable. The game of roulette is not subject, in this sense, to uncertainty . . . The expectation of life is only slightly uncertain. Even the weather is only moderately uncertain. The sense in which I am using the term is that in which the prospect of a European war is uncertain, or . . . the rate of interest twenty years hence . . . About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know.*

凯恩斯接着假设,投资者在这种情况下“会设法以一种能维护我们作为理性经济学家面子的方式行事”:

Keynes went on to hypothesize about the ways in which investors ‘manage in such circumstances to behave in a manner which saves our faces as rational, economic men’:

(1)我们假定现在比坦诚审视过去经验更能有效地指导未来,而事实上并非如此。换句话说,我们很大程度上忽略了未来可能发生的变化,因为我们对这些变化的实际性质一无所知。

(2)我们假设,以价格和现有产出特征所反映的现有舆论状况,是基于对未来前景的正确总结……

(3)我们深知自己的个人判断毫无价值,于是努力求助于或许更了解情况的其他人的判断。也就是说,我们努力使自己的行为符合大多数人或平均水平。9

(1) We assume that the present is a much more serviceable guide to the future than a candid examination of past experience would show it to have been hitherto. In other words we largely ignore the prospect of future changes about the actual character of which we know nothing.

(2) We assume that the existing state of opinion as expressed in prices and the character of existing output is based on a correct summing up of future prospects . . .

(3) Knowing that our own individual judgment is worthless, we endeavor to fall back on the judgment of the rest of the world which is perhaps better informed. That is, we endeavor to conform with the behavior of the majority or the average.9

尽管凯恩斯对投资者行为的解读是否正确尚无定论,但他的思路无疑是正确的。因为毫无疑问,个人的启发式偏差在金融市场波动中扮演着至关重要的角色。

Though it is far from clear that Keynes was correct in his interpretation of investors’ behaviour, he was certainly thinking along the right lines. For there is no question that the heuristic biases of individuals play a critical role in generating volatility in financial markets.

这就引出了金融体系固有不稳定性之二:人的行为。正如我们所见,所有金融机构都受制于我们与生俱来的情绪波动:从极度兴奋到极度沮丧;我们屡屡无法防范“尾部风险”;以及我们始终未能从历史中吸取教训。在一篇著名的文章中,丹尼尔·卡尼曼和阿莫斯·特沃斯基通过一系列实验证明了人们在面对简单的金融选择时,往往会错误地估计概率。首先,他们给样本组每人1000以色列镑。然后,他们让参与者在以下两个选项中选择:a) 有50%的概率赢得额外的1000镑;b) 有100%的概率赢得额外的500镑。结果只有16%的人选择了a,其余84%的人都选择了b。接下来,他们让同一组人想象自己每人收到2000以色列镑,并让他们面临另一个选择:要么c) 有50%的概率损失1000镑,要么d) 有100%的概率损失500镑。这一次,大多数人(69%)选择了c);只有31%的人选择了d)。然而,从收益的角度来看,这两个问题是相同的。在两种情况下,你都面临着一个选择:c) 有50%的概率损失1000镑,d) 有100%的概率损失500镑。有一定几率最终得到 1000 英镑,也有相等几率最终得到 2000 英镑(a 和 c),或者确定最终得到 1500 英镑(b 和 d)。在这项实验和其他实验中,卡尼曼和特沃斯基发现了一种显著的不对称性:人们对积极前景持规避风险的态度,而对消极前景则倾向于冒险。损失的影响大约是同等金额收益的 2.5 倍。 10

This brings us to the second reason for the inherent instability of the financial system: human behaviour. As we have seen, all financial institutions are at the mercy of our innate inclination to veer from euphoria to despondency; our recurrent inability to protect ourselves against ‘tail risk’; our perennial failure to learn from history. In a famous article, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky demonstrated with a series of experiments the tendency that people have to miscalculate probabilities when confronted with simple financial choices. First, they gave their sample group 1,000 Israeli pounds each. Then they offered them a choice between either a) a 50 per cent chance of winning an additional 1,000 pounds or b) a 100 per cent chance of winning an additional 500 pounds. Only 16 per cent of people chose a); everyone else (84 per cent) chose b). Next, they asked the same group to imagine having received 2,000 Israeli pounds each and confronted them with another choice: between either c) a 50 per cent chance of losing 1,000 pounds or d) a 100 per cent chance of losing 500 pounds. This time the majority (69 per cent) chose c); only 31 per cent chose d). Yet, viewed in terms of their payoffs, the two problems are identical. In both cases you have a choice between a 50 per cent chance of ending up with 1,000 pounds and an equal chance of ending up with 2,000 pounds (a and c) or a certainty of ending up with 1,500 pounds (b and d). In this and other experiments, Kahneman and Tversky identify a striking asymmetry: risk aversion for positive prospects, but risk seeking for negative ones. A loss has about two and a half times the impact of a gain of the same magnitude.10

这种“不变性失效”只是众多启发式偏差(扭曲的思维或学习模式)之一,这些偏差将真实的人类与新古典经济理论中的“经济人”区分开来。后者被认为能够基于所有可用信息和预期效用做出理性决策。其他实验表明,我们也很容易陷入以下认知陷阱:

This ‘failure of invariance’ is only one of many heuristic biases (skewed modes of thinking or learning) that distinguish real human beings from the homo oeconomicus of neoclassical economic theory, who is supposed to make his decisions rationally, on the basis of all the available information and his expected utility. Other experiments show that we also succumb too readily to such cognitive traps as:

  1. 可得性偏差导致我们根据记忆中更容易获取的信息做出决定,而不是根据我们真正需要的数据做出决定;

  2. Availability bias, which causes us to base decisions on information that is more readily available in our memories, rather than the data we really need;

  3. 后见之明偏差,导致我们在事件发生后(事后)赋予其更高的概率,而不是在事件发生前(事前)赋予其更高的概率;

  4. Hindsight bias, which causes us to attach higher probabilities to events after they have happened (ex post) than we did before they happened (ex ante);

  5. 归纳法的问题在于,它导致我们在信息不足的情况下制定一般规则;

  6. The problem of induction, which leads us to formulate general rules on the basis of insufficient information;

  7. 合取谬误(或析取谬误)意味着我们倾向于高估七个概率为 90% 的事件同时发生概率,而低估七个概率为 10% 的事件中至少一个发生的概率;

  8. The fallacy of conjunction (or disjunction), which means we tend to overestimate the probability that seven events of 90 per cent probability will all occur, while underestimating the probability that at least one of seven events of 10 per cent probability will occur;

  9. 确认偏差使我们倾向于寻找证实最初假设的证据,而不是寻找证伪该假设的证据;

  10. Confirmation bias, which inclines us to look for confirming evidence of an initial hypothesis, rather than falsifying evidence that would disprove it;

  11. 污染效应,即我们允许无关但邻近的信息影响决策;

  12. Contamination effects, whereby we allow irrelevant but proximate information to influence a decision;

  13. 情感启发式,即先入为主的价值判断会干扰我们对成本和收益的评估;

  14. The affect heuristic, whereby preconceived value-judgments interfere with our assessment of costs and benefits;

  15. 范围忽视,导致我们无法按比例调整为了避免不同数量级的损害而应该愿意做出的牺牲;

  16. Scope neglect, which prevents us from proportionately adjusting what we should be willing to sacrifice to avoid harms of different orders of magnitude;

  17. 对校准结果的过度自信会导致我们低估估计结果稳健的置信区间(例如,将“最佳情况”与“最可能情况”混淆);

  18. Overconfidence in calibration, which leads us to underestimate the confidence intervals within which our estimates will be robust (e.g. to conflate the ‘best case’ scenario with the ‘most probable’); and

  19. 旁观者冷漠,使我们在人群中倾向于放弃个人责任。11

  20. Bystander apathy, which inclines us to abdicate individual responsibility when in a crowd.11

如果你仍然怀疑人类天生的易错性,不妨问问自己以下问题。球棒和球一共花了1.10英镑,球棒比球贵1英镑。那么球多少钱?大约每两个人中就有一个人会脱口而出错误的答案:10便士。正确答案是5便士,因为只有当球棒价值1.05英镑,球价值5便士时,这两个条件才能同时满足

If you still doubt the hard-wired fallibility of human beings, ask yourself the following question. A bat and ball, together, cost a total of £1.10 and the bat costs £1 more than the ball. How much is the ball? The wrong answer is the one that roughly one in every two people blurts out: 10 pence. The correct answer is 5 pence, since only with a bat worth £1.05 and a ball worth 5 pence are both conditions satisfied.12

如果说哪个领域有潜力彻底改变我们对金融市场运作方式的理解,那无疑非蓬勃发展的行为金融学莫属。13目前还不清楚有多少源于有效市场假说的研究成果能够经受住这一挑战。14那些信奉“群体智慧”的人15认为这不过是认为一大群人比一小群所谓的专家更有可能做出正确的判断。但这并不能说明什么。“宏观经济学家成功预测了过去五次衰退中的九次”这句老话与其说是笑话,不如说是经济预测难度之大的一个令人沮丧的真相。16与此同时,认真研究人类心理学的学者会预料到,一大群人既可能展现智慧,也可能展现疯狂。17一个典型的例子是,2007年上半年,投资者几乎普遍存在一种错觉,认为不会发生严重的流动性危机(参见)。引言)。借用埃利泽·尤德科夫斯基的精辟总结:

If any field has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the way financial markets work, it must surely be the burgeoning discipline of behavioural finance.13 It is far from clear how much of the body of work derived from the efficient markets hypothesis can survive this challenge.14 Those who put their faith in the ‘wisdom of crowds’15 mean no more than that a large group of people is more likely to make a correct assessment than a small group of supposed experts. But that is not saying much. The old joke that ‘Macroeconomists have successfully predicted nine of the last five recessions’ is not so much a joke as a dispiriting truth about the difficulty of economic forecasting.16 Meanwhile, serious students of human psychology will expect as much madness as wisdom from large groups of people.17 A case in point must be the near-universal delusion among investors in the first half of 2007 that a major liquidity crisis could not occur (see Introduction). To adapt an elegant summation by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

人们可能过于自信和乐观。他们可能过于关注未来具体的场景,而忽略其他可能性。他们可能完全不记得过去发生过任何流动性危机。他们可能高估了过去的可预测性,从而低估了未来的意外性。他们可能意识不到,在没有事后诸葛亮的情况下,应对流动性危机有多么困难。他们可能更倾向于高回报概率的赌博,而忽视了风险的价值。他们可能混淆了关于某项技术(例如信用违约互换)益处的正面信息和关于其风险的负面信息。他们可能受到电影的影响,电影中金融体系最终得以拯救……或者,流动性危机的可怕前景可能促使他们寻找流动性不会枯竭的理由却不去同样疯狂地寻找流动性应该枯竭的理由。但如果具体问题是“为什么没有更多人采取行动?”,那么一个可能的原因是,人们正在问自己这个问题——他们四处张望,看看是否有人采取了行动……同时努力表现得镇定自若。18

People may be overconfident and over-optimistic. They may focus on overly specific scenarios for the future, to the exclusion of all others. They may not recall any past [liquidity crises] in memory. They may overestimate the predictability of the past, and hence underestimate the surprise of the future. They may not realize the difficulty of preparing for [liquidity crises] without the benefit of hindsight. They may prefer . . . gambles with higher payoff probabilities, neglecting the value of the stakes. They may conflate positive information about the benefits of a technology [e.g. credit default swaps] and negative information about its risks. They may be contaminated by movies where the [financial system] ends up being saved . . . Or the extremely unpleasant prospect of [a liquidity crisis] may spur them to seek arguments that [liquidity] will not [dry up], without an equally frantic search for reasons why [it should]. But if the question is, specifically, ‘Why aren’t more people doing something about it?’, one possible component is that people are asking that very question – darting their eyes around to see if anyone else is reacting . . . meanwhile trying to appear poised and unflustered.18

当然,我们大部分的认知扭曲都是进化的结果。金融历史走向动荡的第三个原因也与进化论有关,尽管是以类比的方式。人们常说金融具有达尔文主义的特征。“适者生存”是激进交易员喜欢用的一句话;正如我们所见,投资银行喜欢举办诸如“卓越的进化”之类的会议。但2007年的美国金融危机增加了这种说法的使用频率。美国财政部助理部长安东尼·W·瑞安并非唯一一个在2007年下半年谈到金融灭绝浪潮的人。马萨诸塞州首席财务官安德鲁·洛也表达了类似的观点。理工学院金融工程实验室在将市场重新概念化为适应性系统方面处于领先地位。 19对金融服务发展的长期历史分析也表明,演化力量在金融领域与在自然界一样普遍存在。 20

Most of our cognitive warping is, of course, the result of evolution. The third reason for the erratic path of financial history is also related to the theory of evolution, though by analogy. It is commonly said that finance has a Darwinian quality. ‘The survival of the fittest’ is a phrase that aggressive traders like to use; as we have seen, investment banks like to hold conferences with titles like ‘The Evolution of Excellence’. But the American crisis of 2007 has increased the frequency of such language. US Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Anthony W. Ryan was not the only person to talk in terms of a wave of financial extinctions in the second half of 2007. Andrew Lo, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering, is in the vanguard of an effort to re-conceptualize markets as adaptive systems.19 A long-run historical analysis of the development of financial services also suggests that evolutionary forces are present in the financial world as much as they are in the natural world.20

当然,达尔文进化过程可能在经济中发挥作用的观点并非新观点。事实上,演化经济学已发展成为一门成熟的子学科,并拥有自己的专属期刊长达十六年之久。早在1898年,索尔斯坦·凡勃伦就首次提出了“为什么经济学不是一门演化科学?”的问题(言下之意是它实际上应该是一门演化科学)。约瑟夫·熊彼特著作《资本主义、社会主义与民主》中有一段著名的论述,同样适用于金融领域,他将工业资本主义描述为“一个演化过程”:

The notion that Darwinian processes may be at work in the economy is not new, of course. Evolutionary economics is in fact a well-established sub-discipline, which has had its own dedicated journal for the past sixteen years.21 Thorstein Veblen first posed the question ‘Why is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?’ (implying that it really should be) as long ago as 1898.22 In a famous passage in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, which could equally well apply to finance, Joseph Schumpeter characterized industrial capitalism as ‘an evolutionary process’:

这种演进性……并非仅仅源于经济生活在不断变化的社会和自然环境中,而这种变化又反过来影响着经济活动的数据;这一事实固然重要,这些变化(战争、革命等等)也常常影响着产业变革,但它们并非产业变革的主要推动力。这种演进性也并非源于人口和资本的准自主增长,或货币体系的变幻莫测——尽管这两者也同样如此。启动并维持资本主义引擎运转的根本动力,来自资本主义企业创造的新型消费品、新的生产或运输方式、新的市场以及新的产业组织形式……无论是在国外还是在国内,新市场的开拓,以及从手工作坊和工厂到美国钢铁公司等大型企业的组织发展,都体现了产业变异的同一过程——如果我可以用生物学术语来解释的话——这一过程不断地革新着经济。从内部构建结构,不断摧毁旧结构,不断创造新结构。这种创造性破坏的过程是资本主义的本质特征。23

This evolutionary character . . . is not merely due to the fact that economic life goes on in a social and natural environment which changes and by its change alters the data of economic action; this fact is important and these changes (wars, revolutions and so on) often condition industrial change, but they are not its prime movers. Nor is this evolutionary character due to quasi-autonomic increase in population and capital or to the vagaries of monetary systems of which exactly the same thing holds true. The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates . . . The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as US Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation – if I may use the biological term – that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.23

近期研究揭示的一个关键点是,现代经济中企业倒闭的程度令人震惊。美国每年约有十分之一的公司消失。确切地说,在1989年至1997年间,平均每年有61.1万家企业倒闭,而当时美国共有573万家企业。值得注意的是,10%是平均倒闭率;在某些经济领域,倒闭率在经济低迷的年份甚至可能高达20%(例如1989年哥伦比亚特区金融业在储贷危机高峰期的情况)。 24据英国贸易和工业部统计,30%的纳税注册企业会在三年后消失。 25即使一些企业能够熬过最初几年并取得巨大成功,最终大多数还是会走向失败。 1912年全球最大的100家公司中,到1995年有29家破产,48家消失,只有19家仍然位列前100强。鉴于银行和股票市场的大部分功能是为公司提供融资,我们不应惊讶地发现金融界也存在类似的“创造性破坏”模式。我们已经注意到对冲基金的高损耗率。正如我们将看到的,更多银行没有倒闭的唯一原因是,它们受到政府或明示或默示的保护,免于破产。

A key point that emerges from recent research is just how much destruction goes on in a modern economy. Around one in ten US companies disappears each year. Between 1989 and 1997, to be precise, an average of 611,000 businesses a year vanished out of a total of 5.73 million firms. Ten per cent is the average extinction rate, it should be noted; in some sectors of the economy it can rise as high as 20 per cent in a bad year (as in the District of Columbia’s financial sector in 1989, at the height of the Savings and Loans crisis).24 According to the UK Department of Trade and Industry, 30 per cent of tax-registered businesses disappear after three years.25 Even if they survive the first few years of existence and go on to enjoy great success, most firms fail eventually. Of the world’s 100 largest companies in 1912, 29 were bankrupt by 1995, 48 had disappeared, and only 19 were still in the top 100.26 Given that a good deal of what banks and stock markets do is to provide finance to companies, we should not be surprised to find a similar pattern of creative destruction in the financial world. We have already noted the high attrition rate among hedge funds. The only reason that more banks do not fail, as we shall see, is that they are implicitly or explicitly protected from collapse by governments.

金融世界与真正的进化系统有哪些共同特征?以下六点尤为突出:

What are the common features shared by the financial world and a true evolutionary system? Six spring to mind:

从某种意义上说,“基因”指的是某些商业实践在生物学中发挥着与基因相同的作用,使得信息能够存储在“组织记忆”中,并在新公司成立时从个人传递到个人,或从公司传递到公司。

‘Genes’, in the sense that certain business practices perform the same role as genes in biology, allowing information to be stored in the ‘organizational memory’ and passed on from individual to individual or from firm to firm when a new firm is created.

自发突变的可能性,在经济界通常被称为创新,而且主要是(但不总是)技术性的。

The potential for spontaneous mutation, usually referred to in the economic world as innovation and primarily, though by no means always, technological.

物种内部个体之间为争夺资源而展开竞争,其结果(以寿命和繁衍为衡量标准)决定了哪些商业行为能够延续下去。

Competition between individuals within a species for resources, with the outcomes in terms of longevity and proliferation determining which business practices persist.

通过资本和人力资源的市场配置实现自然选择,表现不佳者可能死亡,即“差异生存”。

A mechanism for natural selection through the market allocation of capital and human resources and the possibility of death in cases of under-performance, i.e. ‘differential survival’.

物种形成的空间,通过创造全新的金融机构物种来维持生物多样性。

Scope for speciation, sustaining biodiversity through the creation of wholly new species of financial institutions.

物种灭绝的可能性很大,甚至可能导致物种彻底消失。

Scope for extinction, with species dying out altogether.

金融史本质上是制度变异和自然选择的结果。随机“漂移”(并非由自然选择推动,而是偶然发生的创新/变异)和“流动”(例如,当美国做法被中国银行采用时产生的创新/变异)也发挥着作用。此外,还可能存在“协同进化”,即不同的金融物种共同运作和适应(例如对冲基金及其一级经纪商)。但市场选择才是主要驱动力。金融实体之间为了有限的资源而相互竞争。在特定的时间和地点,某些物种可能会占据主导地位。但竞争对手的创新,或全新物种的出现,会阻止任何永久性等级制度或单一文化的形成。总的来说,适者生存的法则适用。那些拥有“自私基因”且擅长自我复制和自我延续的机构往往会不断增殖并长期存在。27

Financial history is essentially the result of institutional mutation and natural selection. Random ‘drift’ (innovations/ mutations that are not promoted by natural selection, but just happen) and ‘flow’ (innovations/mutations that are caused when, say, American practices are adopted by Chinese banks) play a part. There can also be ‘co-evolution’, when different financial species work and adapt together (like hedge funds and their prime brokers). But market selection is the main driver. Financial organisms are in competition with one another for finite resources. At certain times and in certain places, certain species may become dominant. But innovations by competitor species, or the emergence of altogether new species, prevent any permanent hierarchy or monoculture from emerging. Broadly speaking, the law of the survival of the fittest applies. Institutions with a ‘selfish gene’ that is good at self-replication and self-perpetuation will tend to proliferate and endure.27

需要注意的是,这未必会导致完美生物的进化。“足够好”的突变如果发生在合适的地点和时间,就能占据主导地位,因为进化过程对初始条件非常敏感;也就是说,最初的微弱优势可能转化为长期的主导地位,而未必是最优的。同样值得注意的是,在自然界中,进化并非像过去人们认为的那样是渐进的(尤其是赫伯特·斯宾塞的追随者们的观点)。像高利贷者这样的原始金融生命体就是如此。它们并非注定要被遗忘,就像那些仍然占据地球物种大多数的微小原核生物一样。进化出的复杂性既不能保护生物体,也不能保护公司免于灭绝——而这正是大多数动植物物种的最终命运。

Note that this may not result in the evolution of the perfect organism. A ‘good enough’ mutation will achieve dominance if it happens in the right place at the right time, because of the sensitivity of the evolutionary process to initial conditions; that is, an initial slim advantage may translate into a prolonged period of dominance, without necessarily being optimal. It is also worth bearing in mind that in the natural world, evolution is not progressive, as used to be thought (notably by the followers of Herbert Spencer). Primitive financial life-forms like loan sharks are not condemned to oblivion, any more than the microscopic prokaryotes that still account for the majority of earth’s species. Evolved complexity protects neither an organism nor a firm against extinction – the fate of most animal and plant species.

诚然,进化论的类比并不完美。在自然界中,一个生物吞噬另一个生物仅仅是进食;而在金融服务领域,并购却可能直接导致变异。在金融体系中,并不存在与动物界有性繁殖相对应的机制(尽管人们常常用通俗易懂的性词汇来描述某些金融交易)。大多数金融变异都是有意识的、经过深思熟虑的创新,而非随机变化。事实上,由于企业可以在其生命周期内适应周围环境的变化,金融演化(如同文化演化)或许更接近拉马克主义而非达尔文主义。下文将讨论另外两个关键区别。尽管如此,进化论无疑为我们理解金融变革提供了一个比其他任何模型都更优的选择。

The evolutionary analogy is, admittedly, imperfect. When one organism ingests another in the natural world, it is just eating; whereas, in the world of financial services, mergers and acquisitions can lead directly to mutation. Among financial organisms, there is no counterpart to the role of sexual reproduction in the animal world (though demotic sexual language is often used to describe certain kinds of financial transaction). Most financial mutation is deliberate, conscious innovation, rather than random change. Indeed, because a firm can adapt within its own lifetime to change going on around it, financial evolution (like cultural evolution) may be more Lamarckian than Darwinian in character. Two other key differences will be discussed below. Nevertheless, evolution certainly offers a better model for understanding financial change than any other we have.

九十年前,德国社会主义者鲁道夫·希尔弗丁预言,所有权将不可阻挡地向他所谓的“金融资本”集中。28传统的金融发展观确实是从大型成功企业的视角来看待这一过程。在花旗集团的官方族谱中,众多小型公司——可以追溯到1812年成立的纽约城市银行——随着时间的推移,似乎都汇聚到一条共同的主干上,也就是如今的金融集团。然而,这恰恰是思考金融长期演变的错误方式,因为金融的演变始于一条共同的主干。随着新型银行和其他金融机构的出现,这条主干会周期性地向外分枝。某个特定公司在发展过程中成功吞并小型公司这一事实,其实无关紧要。在进化过程中,动物之间会互相捕食,但这并非进化突变以及新物种和亚种出现的驱动力。关键在于,规模经济和范围经济并非总是金融历史的驱动力。更多时候,真正的驱动力是物种形成过程——即创造出全新的公司类型——以及同样反复出现的创造性破坏过程——即较弱的公司消亡。

Ninety years ago, the German socialist Rudolf Hilferding predicted an inexorable movement towards more concentration of ownership in what he termed finance capital.28 The conventional view of financial development does indeed see the process from the vantage point of the big, successful survivor firm. In Citigroup’s official family tree, numerous small firms – dating back to the City Bank of New York, founded in 1812 – are seen to converge over time on a common trunk, the present-day conglomerate. However, this is precisely the wrong way to think about financial evolution over the long run, since it begins at a common trunk. Periodically, the trunk branches outwards as new kinds of bank and other financial institution evolve. The fact that a particular firm successfully devours smaller firms along the way is more or less irrelevant. In the evolutionary process, animals eat one another, but that is not the driving force behind evolutionary mutation and the emergence of new species and sub-species. The point is that economies of scale and scope are not always the driving force in financial history. More often, the real drivers are the process of speciation – whereby entirely new types of firm are created – and the equally recurrent process of creative destruction, whereby weaker firms die out.

以零售和商业银行业为例,该领域仍然存在相当大的多样性。尽管花旗集团和美国银行这样的巨头依然存在,但北美和一些欧洲市场的零售银行业仍然相对分散。近年来,合作银行业的变化最大,经历了高度整合(尤其是在20世纪80年代储贷危机之后),大多数机构都转向了股东所有制。当我最初开始思考这个问题时,在发达国家,唯一濒临灭绝的银行类型似乎是国有银行,因为私有化席卷了全球。但金融危机改变了这一切。从北方银行的国有化开始,国有银行业出现了惊人的复苏。在我为平装版撰写这篇修订版后记时,美国政府很可能被迫接管花旗银行、美国银行和其他濒临破产的机构。

Take the case of retail and commercial banking, where there remains considerable biodiversity. Although giants like Citigroup and Bank of America exist, North America and some European markets still have relatively fragmented retail banking sectors. The cooperative banking sector has seen the most change in recent years, with high levels of consolidation (especially following the Savings and Loans crisis of the 1980s), and most institutions moving to shareholder ownership. When I first started to think along these lines, the only species of bank that seemed close to extinction in the developed world was the state-owned bank, as privatization had swept the world. But the financial crisis has changed all that. Beginning with the nationalization of Northern Rock, state ownership has made a remarkable comeback. At the time of writing this revised Afterword for the paperback edition, it seems likely that a reluctant US administration will be forced to take control of Citibank, Bank of America and other institutions close to the brink of insolvency.

在其他方面,近年来金融机构的发展历程更像是物种分化,新型金融机构层出不穷,这正符合我们对一个真正进化系统的预期。许多新的“单一业务”金融服务公司应运而生,尤其是在消费金融领域(例如,Capital One)。一些新的“精品”银行也应运而生,专门服务于私人银行市场。直接银行服务(电话和互联网)是另一个相对较新且发展迅速的现象。同样,即便在投资银行领域巨头林立的同时,对冲基金和私募股权合伙企业等新型且更灵活的机构也在不断发展壮大。正如我们在第六章中所看到的,制成品和能源出口国的硬通货储备迅速积累,催生了新一代主权财富基金。

In other respects, the story in recent years has been one of speciation, the proliferation of new types of financial institution, which is just what we would expect in a truly evolutionary system. Many new ‘mono-line’ financial services firms have emerged, especially in consumer finance (for example, Capital One). A number of new ‘boutiques’ now exist to cater to the private banking market. Direct banking (telephone and Internet) is another relatively recent and growing phenomenon. Likewise, even as giants were forming in the realm of investment banking, new and nimbler species such as hedge funds and private equity partnerships were also evolving and proliferating. And, as we saw in Chapter 6, the rapidly accruing hard currency reserves of exporters of manufactured goods and energy have produced a new generation of sovereign wealth funds.

不仅新型金融机构层出不穷,新型金融资产和服务也同样如此。在2007年之前的几年里,投资者对抵押贷款的需求急剧增长。以资产为支撑的证券和其他资产支持证券。衍生品的使用也大幅增加,其中大部分是通过场外交易,以一对一的定制方式进行买卖,而不是通过公开交易所——这种趋势虽然对衍生品卖方有利可图,但由于这些工具缺乏标准化,以及在危机发生时可能引发法律纠纷,也带来了一些令人不快的意外后果。

Not only have new forms of financial firm proliferated; so too have new forms of financial asset and service. In the years before 2007, the appetite of investors grew dramatically for mortgage-backed and other asset-backed securities. The use of derivatives also increased enormously, with the majority being bought and sold ‘over the counter’, on a one-to-one bespoke basis, rather than through public exchanges – a tendency which, though profitable for the sellers of derivatives, has had unpleasant as well as unintended consequences because of the lack of standardization of these instruments and the potential for legal disputes in the event of a crisis.

从进化论的角度来看,金融服务业似乎经历了一场持续二十年的寒武纪生命大爆发,现有物种蓬勃发展,新物种数量也随之增加。正如自然界一样,巨头的存在并没有阻止小型物种的进化和延续。规模并非一切,金融领域亦是如此。事实上,随着上市公司规模的扩大和复杂性的增加,随之而来的种种难题——例如官僚主义带来的规模不经济、季度报告的压力——反而为新型私营企业提供了机遇。在进化过程中,重要的不是规模,也不是(超过一定程度后)复杂性。关键在于能否有效地生存和繁衍。在金融领域,这相当于能够有效地创造股权回报,并吸引模仿者采用类似的商业模式。

In evolutionary terms, then, the financial services sector appears to have passed through a twenty-year Cambrian explosion, with existing species flourishing and new species increasing in number. As in the natural world, the existence of giants has not precluded the evolution and continued existence of smaller species. Size isn’t everything, in finance as in nature. Indeed, the very difficulties that arise as publicly owned firms become larger and more complex – the diseconomies of scale associated with bureaucracy, the pressures associated with quarterly reporting – give opportunities to new forms of private firm. What matters in evolution is not your size or (beyond a certain level) your complexity. All that matters is that you are good at surviving and reproducing your genes. The financial equivalent is being good at generating returns on equity and spawning imitators employing a similar business model.

在金融领域,突变和物种形成通常是对环境和竞争的进化反应,自然选择决定哪些新性状能够广泛传播。有时,如同自然界一样,进化过程也会受到地缘政治冲击和金融危机等重大干扰。当然,不同之处在于,巨型小行星撞击(例如在白垩纪末期导致85%物种灭绝的小行星撞击)是外生冲击,而金融危机则是金融体系内部的内在因素。20世纪30年代的大萧条和70年代的大通货膨胀是金融体系发生重大断裂的时期,伴随着诸如30年代的银行挤兑和80年代的储贷危机等“大规模灭绝”事件。

In the financial world, mutation and speciation have usually been evolved responses to the environment and competition, with natural selection determining which new traits become widely disseminated. Sometimes, as in the natural world, the evolutionary process has been subject to big disruptions in the form of geopolitical shocks and financial crises. The difference is, of course, that whereas giant asteroids (like the one that eliminated 85 per cent of species at the end of the Cretaceous period) are exogenous shocks, financial crises are endogenous to the financial system. The Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Inflation of the 1970s stand out as times of major discontinuity, with ‘mass extinctions’ such as the bank panics of the 1930s and the Savings and Loans failures of the 1980s.

类似的事情如今显然正在我们这个时代发生。始于2007年夏季的信贷状况和资产价格急剧恶化,给许多对冲基金带来了严峻挑战,使它们极易受到投资者赎回的影响。即使是一些在危机初期表现良好的基金(尤其是肯·格里芬的城堡投资集团),也在2008年遭受了巨额损失。但金融危机更重要的特征在于其对银行业造成的毁灭性打击。国际货币基金组织估计,全球范围内美国资产支持证券和其他高风险债务的损失约为2.2万亿美元。截至本文撰写之时(2009年2月),所有金融机构已确认约1.1万亿美元的资产减记(已入账损失),这意味着目前已知的潜在损失仅占总损失的一半。自危机爆发以来,美国银行业已减记4940亿美元,并筹集了约4480亿美元的新资本,但仍存在近500亿美元的资金缺口。由于银行通常将资本充足率目标设定在10%以下,这意味着资产负债表可能需要缩减高达5000亿美元。然而,所谓“影子银行体系”(即结构化投资工具和资金转嫁渠道等表外实体)的崩溃,使得这种缩减变得异常困难,因为它们的资产和负债又重新回到了银行的资产负债表上。此外,非金融客户为了增加流动性,一直在动用预先安排的信贷额度,导致银行资产进一步增加。

Something similar is now clearly happening in our time. The sharp deterioration in credit conditions and asset prices that began in the summer of 2007 created acute problems for many hedge funds, leaving them vulnerable to redemptions by investors. Even some of those (notably Ken Griffin’s Citadel) that performed well in the initial phase of the crisis suffered heavy losses in 2008. But a more important feature of the financial crisis has been its devastating impact on banks. Worldwide losses on US asset-backed securities and other forms of risky debt are estimated by the International Monetary Fund to be around $2.2 trillion. At the time of writing (February 2009), around $1.1 trillion of write-downs (booked losses) have been acknowledged by all financial institutions, which means that only half the likely losses have so far come to light. Since the onset of the crisis, US banks have written down $494 billion and raised around $448 billion of new capital, leaving a shortfall of slightly less than $50 billion. Since banks typically target a capital/assets ratio of rather less than 10 per cent, that implies that balance sheets may need to be shrunk by as much as $500 billion. However, the collapse of the so-called shadow banking system of off-balance-sheet entities such as structured investment vehicles and conduits has made that contraction very difficult indeed, bringing their assets and liabilities back on to the banks’ balance sheets. Moreover, non-financial clients have been drawing on pre-arranged credit lines in order to increase their liquidity, causing a further increase in bank assets.

此次危机暴露了规范银行资本充足率的国际协议(巴塞尔协议I和II)的根本缺陷。例如,在欧洲,银行平均资本金目前仅占资产的不到10%(可能低至4%),而20世纪初这一比例约为25%。换句话说,危机前的几年里,平均杠杆率(资产与资本的比率)被允许飙升。例如,到2008年9月,美国银行的杠杆率高达73.7比1(即其资本金仅占资产的1.4%)。如果将表外债务也计算在内,杠杆率将飙升至惊人的134比1。这是债务普遍膨胀的一部分,当时的总债务(包括金融、企业、家庭和政府债务)占GDP的比重从1974年的略高于160%上升到2008年的超过350%。家庭债务不断增长的经济重要性可以从以下事实看出:如果没有抵押贷款权益提取带来的消费刺激,乔治·W·布什总统任期内美国经济的实际增长率将只有每年1%左右。如今,这种高杠杆时代即将结束。

The crisis has exposed fundamental flaws in the international accords (Basel I and II)* governing bank capital adequacy. In Europe, for example, average bank capital is now equivalent to significantly less than 10 per cent of assets (perhaps as little as 4), compared with around 25 per cent towards the beginning of the twentieth century. Put differently, average leverage (the ratio of assets to capital) was allowed to soar in the pre-crisis years. For example, by September 2008, Bank of America’s leverage ratio was 73.7 to 1 (i.e. its capital was equal to just 1.4 per cent of its assets). If off-balance-sheet commitments were included, the leverage ratio rose to a staggering 134 to 1. This was part of a general explosion of debt which saw total debt (financial, corporate, household and government) rise from just over 160 per cent of GDP in 1974 to more than 350 per cent in 2008. The economic importance of rising household debt can be gauged from the fact that, without the boost to consumption provided by mortgage equity withdrawal, the real growth rate of the US economy during the presidency of George W. Bush would have been around one per cent a year. This age of leverage is now ending.

金融危机也粉碎了那些认为风险产生与资产负债表管理分离能够使风险在整个金融体系中实现最优分配的人们的希望。事实似乎恰恰相反,巨大的风险集中积聚在金融体系的核心地带。此外,证券化体系——在其鼎盛时期几乎占所有信贷创造的五分之一——也出乎意料地脆弱。

The financial crisis has also dashed the hopes of those who believed that the separation of risk origination and balance sheet management would distribute risk optimally throughout the financial system. The very opposite seems to have happened, with enormous concentrations of risk accumulating right at the heart of the financial system. Moreover, the system of securitization – which at its peak accounted for nearly a fifth of all credit creation – has proved unexpectedly vulnerable.

从进化论的角度来看,这场危机已经造成了一次重大的物种灭绝。曾经主导华尔街的美国投资银行已经消失:要么破产(如雷曼兄弟),要么被商业银行收购(如贝尔斯登和美林证券),要么为了生存被迫转型为商业银行(如高盛和摩根士丹利)。与此同时,债券保险公司似乎也难逃消亡的命运。在其他金融领域,情况更多的是数量减少,而非彻底灭绝。这场危机似乎不太可能在没有进一步的并购的情况下结束。在大西洋两岸的商业银行中,强者将吞并弱者,这种局面正在上演。事实上,美国银行的肯·刘易斯去年就预测,美国8500家银行中只有一半能够挺过这场危机。然而,刘易斯自收购美林证券以来所面临的困境,也让其他潜在买家难以从中得到任何鼓舞。随着弱者被投资者抛弃或被强者收购,对冲基金的数量将至少减少三分之一。*危机过后,全新的金融机构形式也可能涌现。正如安德鲁·洛所言:“就像过去市场中的森林大火一样,我们很可能会看到令人难以置信的新事物在危机过后涌现。” 29这或许正是建立一家传统型商业银行的绝佳时机,这种银行注重的是关系而非交易,旨在重建许多老牌银行已经失去的信任。

In evolutionary terms, this crisis has already caused one major extinction. The US investment banks, once Wall Street’s dominant players, have disappeared: either bankrupt (as in the case of Lehman Brothers), taken over by commercial banks (Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch) or forced to transform themselves into commercial banks in order to survive (Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley). Bond insurance companies, meanwhile, also seem destined to disappear. In other financial sectors the story is of population decline rather than outright extinction. It seems unlikely that this crisis will pass without further mergers and acquisitions by commercial banks on both sides of the Atlantic, as the relatively strong devour the relatively weak. Indeed, Ken Lewis of Bank of America predicted last year that only half of America’s 8,500 banks would survive the crisis. Yet Lewis’s own difficulties since his purchase of Merrill Lynch offer little encouragement to other potential buyers. The number of hedge funds will decline by at least a third as the weak are deserted by investors or absorbed by the strong.* It also seems possible that wholly new forms of financial institution will spring up in the aftermath of the crisis. As Andrew Lo has suggested: ‘As with past forest fires in the markets, we’re likely to see incredible flora and fauna springing up in its wake.’29 This might just be the perfect opportunity to set up an old-fashioned kind of merchant bank, focused on relationships rather than transactions, and aiming to build the trust that so many established banks have forfeited.

自然与金融之间还有另一个重大区别。生物学的进化发生在自然环境中,那里的变化本质上是随机的(因此才有了理查德·道金斯笔下盲眼钟表匠的比喻),而金融服务业的进化则发生在监管框架内,借用反达尔文主义神创论者的说法,其中“智能设计”发挥了作用。监管环境的突变与宏观经济环境的突变截然不同,后者类似于自然界的环境变化。区别在于,监管变化中存在内生性因素,因为负责监管的人往往是曾经的“偷猎者”如今的“护林员”,他们对私营部门的运作方式有着深刻的理解。然而,其最终影响类似于气候变化对生物进化的影响。新的规章制度可能会使原本有利的性状突然变得不利。储蓄和……的兴衰就是一个例证。例如,贷款的增长很大程度上是由于美国监管环境的变化。当前金融危机后的监管变化可能会产生类似意想不到的后果。

There is another big difference between nature and finance. Whereas evolution in biology takes place in the natural environment, where change is essentially random (hence Richard Dawkins’s image of the blind watchmaker), evolution in financial services occurs within a regulatory framework where – to borrow a phrase from anti-Darwinian creationists – ‘intelligent design’ plays a part. Sudden changes to the regulatory environment are rather different from sudden changes in the macroeconomic environment, which are analogous to environmental changes in the natural world. The difference is once again that there is an element of endogeneity in regulatory changes, since those responsible are often poachers turned gamekeepers, with a good insight into the way that the private sector works. The net effect, however, is similar to climate change on biological evolution. New rules and regulations can make previously good traits suddenly disadvantageous. The rise and fall of Savings and Loans, for example, was due in large measure to changes in the regulatory environment in the United States. Regulatory changes in the wake of the current financial crisis may have comparably unforeseen consequences.

大多数监管机构的既定目标是维护金融服务业的稳定,从而保护银行服务的消费者以及该行业所支撑的“实体”经济。非金融行业的公司被认为对整体经济的系统重要性较低,对消费者生计的重要性也较低。因此,大型金融机构的倒闭,尤其是零售客户存款损失的倒闭,是任何监管机构(以及政治家)都竭力避免的事件。自2007年8月以来,一个老生常谈的问题再次浮现:对银行的明示和默示救助担保在多大程度上会造成道德风险问题?这种风险会鼓励过度冒险,因为人们假定,如果一家机构被认为“大到不能倒”(即政治敏感性过高或极有可能拖累其他公司),国家就会出手干预,以避免流动性不足甚至破产。然而,从演化的角度来看,这个问题略有不同。事实上,任何机构都不应属于“大到不能倒”的范畴,因为如果没有偶尔的创造性破坏,进化过程将会受阻。日本在20世纪90年代的经验警示立法者和监管机构,如果机构业绩不佳却仍被扶持,且不良贷款不被注销,那么整个银行业可能会变成经济的“死手”。普遍认为,雷曼兄弟本不应该在2008年9月倒闭。然而,很难想象当时美林证券和雷曼兄弟是如何被挽救的。毫无疑问,美国财政部低估了雷曼兄弟破产的影响,尤其是对外国债券持有人的影响。另一方面,如果没有雷曼兄弟倒闭后危机的明显恶化,财政部又如何能够确保通过设立7000亿美元问题资产救助计划的法案呢?

The stated intention of most regulators is to maintain stability within the financial services sector, thereby protecting the consumers whom banks serve and the ‘real’ economy which the industry supports. Companies in non-financial industries are seen as less systemically important to the economy as a whole and less critical to the livelihood of the consumer. The collapse of a major financial institution, particularly one in which retail customers lose their deposits, is therefore an event which any regulator (and politician) wishes to avoid at all costs. An old question that has raised its head since August 2007 is how far explicit and implicit guarantees to bail out banks create a problem of moral hazard, encouraging excessive risk-taking on the assumption that the state will intervene to avert illiquidity and even insolvency if an institution is considered too big to fail – meaning too politically sensitive or too likely to bring a lot of other firms down with it. From an evolutionary perspective, however, the problem looks slightly different. It may, in fact, be undesirable to have any institutions in the category of ‘too big to fail’, because without occasional bouts of creative destruction the evolutionary process will be thwarted. The experience of Japan in the 1990s stands as a warning to legislators and regulators that an entire banking sector can become a kind of economic dead hand if institutions are propped up despite under-performance, and bad debts are not written off. The conventional wisdom has it that Lehman Brothers should not have been allowed to fail in September 2008. And yet it is difficult to see how, at that time, both Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers could have been saved. No doubt the US Treasury underestimated the impact of the Lehman bankruptcy, especially on foreign bondholders. On the other hand, how could the Treasury have secured the passage of the bill establishing the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program without the palpable worsening of the crisis that followed Lehman’s failure?

金融体系的每一次冲击都必然会造成损失。如果任其自然发展,自然选择会迅速淘汰市场中最弱小的机构,而这些机构通常会被成功的机构吞并。但大多数危机也会催生新的规章制度,因为立法者和监管机构会争相稳定金融体系并保护消费者/选民的利益。关键在于,过度谨慎的规则不能也不应该消除灭绝的可能性。正如约瑟夫·熊彼特七十多年前所写:“这个经济体系离不开彻底摧毁那些与无可救药的不适应环境的企业这一终极法则。”在他看来,这意味着“那些不适宜生存的企业”的彻底消失。 30

Every shock to the financial system must result in casualties. Left to itself, natural selection should work fast to eliminate the weakest institutions in the market, which typically are gobbled up by the successful. But most crises also usher in new rules and regulations, as legislators and regulators rush to stabilize the financial system and to protect the consumer/voter. The critical point is that the possibility of extinction cannot and should not be removed by excessively precautionary rules. As Joseph Schumpeter wrote more than seventy years ago, ‘This economic system cannot do without the ultima ratio of the complete destruction of those existences which are irretrievably associated with the hopelessly unadapted.’ This meant, in his view, nothing less than the disappearance of ‘those firms which are unfit to live’.30

西方各国政府自2008年9月以来采取的非常规措施能否达到预期效果,防止金融体系彻底崩溃,还是最终会阻碍金融体系的演进,仍有待观察。在美国,美联储实际上已将最低利率降至零。美联储与财政部以及资金严重超负荷运转的联邦存款保险公司合作,向金融机构提供了价值约8万亿美元的贷款、注资和担保。美联储的定期资产支持证券贷款机制也将投入高达1万亿美元,用于重启贷款证券化进程。然而,鉴于2月份宣布的公私合营投资基金可能不足以应对危机,无疑还需要更多资金用于银行资本重组或彻底国有化。与所有这些针对金融体系的措施相比,奥巴马政府7870亿美元的财政刺激计划显得微不足道。

It remains to be seen whether the extraordinary measures taken by Western governments since September 2008 will have the desired effect of preventing a complete breakdown of the financial system or whether they will in fact end up impeding the process of financial evolution. In the United States, the Federal Reserve has effectively cut its minimum rate to zero. In conjunction with the Treasury and the alarmingly overstretched Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, it has provided financial institutions with loans, capital injections and guarantees worth around $8 trillion. The Fed’s Term Asset-backed Securities Loan Facility will also commit up to $1 trillion to reviving the loan securitization process. And yet more money will doubtless be needed for bank recapitalization or outright nationalization, given the likely insufficiency of the Public Private Investment Fund announced in February. By comparison with all these measures targeted at the financial system, the Obama administration’s $787 billion fiscal stimulus seems like small beer.

国家救助的代价是国家控制,而美国银行业已经发现,它们在高管薪酬和聘用外国人方面的行动自由受到了限制。这是否标志着政府对金融的控制将重回世界大战时期的水平?当然,金融危机在某一方面已经显现出这种趋势。这让我们仿佛回到了上世纪40年代。所有这些新增支出的直接后果将是政府赤字大幅增加,预计2009年赤字将超过GDP的12%,或联邦总支出的44%。自二战以来,支出与税收收入之间的差距从未如此之大。截至撰稿时,最大的谜团是究竟谁会购买这1.75万亿美元的新美国国债。是忠于中美伙伴关系的中国人?是突然变得节俭的美国家庭?还是拥有印钞机的美联储?

The price of rescue by the state is control by the state, and already American banks are finding their freedom of action limited with respect to the compensation of executives and the hiring of foreigners. Could this mark a return to the kind of governmental control of finance last seen during the world wars? Certainly, there is one respect in which the financial crisis has already catapulted us back to the 1940s. A direct consequence of all these new expenditures will be a huge increase in the government deficit, which is set to exceed 12 per cent of GDP or 44 per cent of total federal expenditure in 2009. Not since World War II has the gap between expenditure and tax revenue been so wide. The mystery at the time of writing is who exactly will buy $1.75 trillion of new US government bonds. The Chinese, faithful to the Chimerican partnership? American households, suddenly converted to thrift? Or the Federal Reserve, armed with the monetary printing press?


在撰写本书的过程中,我经常被问到书名是否不合适。《货币的崛起》这个书名听起来或许有些不合时宜地乐观(尤其对于那些没能理解书中对布罗诺夫斯基《人类的崛起》的致敬的人来说),毕竟我们正经历着自大萧条以来最严重的金融危机。然而,读者现在应该已经清楚地认识到,自美索不达米亚放贷者起源以来,我们的金融体系已经取得了多么巨大的进步。诚然,我们经历过巨大的挫折、萎缩和消亡。但即使是最糟糕的时期也未能让我们永久地倒退。尽管金融史的轨迹呈锯齿状,但其发展轨迹无疑是向上的。

In writing this book, I have frequently been asked if I gave it the wrong title. The Ascent of Money may seem to sound an incongruously optimistic note (especially to those who miss the allusion to Bronowski’s Ascent of Man) amid the worst financial crisis since the depression. Yet it should by now be obvious to the reader just how far our financial system has ascended since its distant origins among the moneylenders of Mesopotamia. There have been great reverses, contractions and dyings, to be sure. But not even the worst has set us permanently back. Though the line of financial history has a saw-tooth quality, its trajectory is unquestionably upwards.

不过,我完全可以像查尔斯·达尔文那样,把这本书命名为《金融的衰落》,因为我讲述的故事的确具有进化论的特征。当我们从自动取款机取出钞票,或者将部分月薪投资于债券和股票,或者为汽车投保,或者重新抵押房屋,或者放弃对本土市场的偏好而转向新兴市场时,我们所做的交易都与许多历史先例有着千丝万缕的联系。

Still, I might equally well have paid homage to Charles Darwin by calling the book The Descent of Finance, for the story I have told is authentically evolutionary. When we withdraw banknotes from automated telling machines, or invest portions of our monthly salaries in bonds and stocks, or insure our cars, or remortgage our homes, or renounce home bias in favour of emerging markets, we are entering into transactions with many historical antecedents.

如今有人谈论“资本主义之死”或“自由市场的终结”,仿佛国家可以替代金融市场。但历史事实,正如现在应该很清楚的那样,是国家与金融市场始终处于共生关系之中。事实上,如果没有……公共财政,以及催生中央银行、债券市场和股票市场的许多金融创新,都将不复存在。我比以往任何时候都更加坚信,除非我们彻底了解金融物种的起源,否则我们将永远无法理解关于货币的根本真相:正如德国总统最近抱怨的那样,金融市场远非“必须被放回原位的怪物”,而是人类的一面镜子,它在每个工作日的每一小时都揭示着我们如何看待自己以及我们周围世界的资源。

There are those who talk today of ‘the death of capitalism’ or ‘the end of free market’, as if the state were somehow an alternative to financial markets. The historical reality, as should by now be clear, is that states and financial markets have always existed in a symbiotic relationship. Indeed, without the exigencies of public finance, much of the financial innovation that produced central banks, the bond market and the stock market would never have occurred. I remain more than ever convinced that, until we fully understand the origin of financial species, we shall never understand the fundamental truth about money: that, far from being ‘a monster that must be put back in its place’, as the German president recently complained,31 financial markets are like the mirror of mankind, revealing every hour of every working day the way we value ourselves and the resources of the world around us.

如果镜子能像映照我们的美丽一样清晰地映照出我们的缺点,那并非镜子的错。

It is not the fault of the mirror if it reflects our blemishes as clearly as our beauty.

8

8

轻微抑郁

The Slight Depression

雷曼家族的倒闭*

The Fall of the House of Lehman*

在《货币崛起》(The Ascent of Money )一书于2008年夏末付梓之前,纽约投资银行雷曼兄弟陷入困境已是众所周知的事实。事实上,在经历了那年春天的种种事件之后,如果有人还认为雷曼兄弟没有陷入困境,那才真是匪夷所思。因为在某些方面,雷曼兄弟只不过是贝尔斯登的放大版,规模大约是贝尔斯登的两倍,需要融资的资产负债表更大,次贷危机造成的损失也更大,交易对手风险也更高,尤其是在衍生品市场。3月份,在纽约联邦储备银行300亿美元的援助下,贝尔斯登找到了买家——摩根大通。但雷曼兄弟却始终未能找到买家。早在9月8日,也就是政府支持的金融实体房利美和房地美被政府接管(即国有化)的第二天,纽约联邦储备银行和美国财政部就已经意识到雷曼兄弟可能破产。

That the New York investment bank Lehman Brothers was in difficulties was widely known before The Ascent of Money went to press in the late summer of 2008. Indeed, to have thought that it was not, after the events of that spring, would have been bizarre, as Lehman was in some respects just a large version of Bear Stearns, roughly twice the size, with a larger balance sheet to finance, larger losses emanating from the subprime crisis, and larger counter-party risk, especially in the derivatives market. In March it had proved possible, with the help of $30 billion from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to find a buyer for Bear Stearns in the form of JP Morgan. It proved impossible to find a buyer for Lehman. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the US Treasury were aware of the potential bankruptcy of Lehman as early as 8 September, the day after the government-sponsored entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had been taken into government ‘conservatorship’, i.e. state ownership.

此处无需赘述接下来一周的事件。摩根大通和其他清算银行不断向雷曼兄弟施压,要求其提供更多抵押品,与此同时,富达等融资渠道也逐渐枯竭。韩国开发银行对雷曼兄弟的潜在投资于9月9日告吹。尽管当局鼓励,但由于政府提供的支持不足,没有美国买家出现。到9月13日星期六上午,美国银行高管在审查雷曼兄弟的资产后估计,其估值过高,高达150亿至250亿美元,如此巨额的资金,雷曼兄弟自身无力承担。第二天,英国政府(出于谨慎考虑)取消了将雷曼兄弟出售给英国巴克莱银行的可能救援方案。

There is no need here to describe in detail the events of the subsequent week.1 JP Morgan and other clearing banks applied mounting pressure on Lehman to post more collateral, at the same time as funding sources such as Fidelity dried up. A possible investment in Lehman from Korea Development Bank evaporated on 9 September. No American buyer stepped forward, despite encouragement from the authorities, because insufficient government support was offered. By the morning of Saturday, 13 September, Bank of America executives reviewing Lehman’s assets had estimated that they were over-valued by anywhere from $15 to $25 billion, an amount too large for them to swallow unassisted. The next day, a possible rescue in the form of sale to the British bank Barclays was (prudently) aborted by the UK government.

包括财政部幕僚长吉姆·威尔金森、纽约联储高级副总裁帕特里夏·莫瑟、美联储理事凯文·沃什以及至关重要的财政部长汉克·保尔森在内的多位关键官员反对救助雷曼兄弟,主要出于政治原因(此前支持贝尔斯登出售给摩根大通的补贴并不受欢迎),但也因为担心救助会引发“道德风险”。美联储提出的由内部清算财团进行清算的方案(美联储会提供部分支持)从未付诸实施,支持规模也从未明确。美联储对于雷曼兄弟能在多大程度上以及以何种方式获得美联储一级交易商信贷额度(Primary Dealer Credit Facility)的资金支持,态度摇摆不定。当潜在买家要求美联储接管雷曼兄弟一些最可疑的资产时,美联储回应称无法这样做。最后,在巴克莱银行的交易失败后,美联储实际上命令雷曼兄弟董事会让其控股公司申请破产,并“以有序的方式”逐步解散这家经纪交易商本身。

A number of key officials – Treasury Chief of Staff Jim Wilkinson, New York Fed Senior Vice President Patricia Mosser, Fed Governor Kevin Warsh and, crucially, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson – argued against a bail-out of Lehman, mainly for political reasons (the subsidies that underpinned the sale of Bear Stearns to JP Morgan had not been popular), but also because of the ‘moral hazard’ that would supposedly arise. The Fed plan for an internal liquidation consortium, with some Fed support, was never acted upon, nor was the size of the support ever specified. The Fed blew hot and cold on how far, and on what basis, Lehman would be able to access the Fed’s Primary Dealer Credit Facility. When potential buyers asked the Fed to take over some of Lehman’s most questionable assets, the Fed responded that it could not do so. Finally, after the Barclays deal had fallen through, the Fed essentially ordered the Lehman board to have their holding company file for bankruptcy and to ‘wind down’ the broker-dealer itself ‘in an orderly fashion’.

随后对允许雷曼兄弟破产给出的理由与当时的理由截然不同。之后,美联储主席本·伯南克辩称,根据《联邦储备法》第13(3)条,存在法律障碍,使得美联储无法像他认为的那样向雷曼兄弟提供必要的贷款(1200万卢比)。(数十亿美元):* “雷曼兄弟没有足够的抵押品,美联储无法向其提供足够的贷款来应对挤兑。” 然而,当时的论点是务实的——这是一个判断问题,而非法律问题——即“投资者和交易对手有时间采取预防措施”。2纽约联储主席蒂姆·盖特纳拒绝了雷曼兄弟管理层提出的将公司转变为银行控股公司的请求,以便使其有资格获得美联储的援助。保尔森或许认为,通过袖手旁观,他可以虚张声势地让“家族掌门人”(大型商业银行的首席执行官们)出手相救,就像1998年对冲基金长期资本管理公司(LTCM)获得救助那样。如果真是这样,他并没有成功。大多数人——当然也包括雷曼兄弟的大多数高层——都认为贝尔斯登的遭遇为政府干预提供了先例。他们没有意识到,事实恰恰相反;出于政治原因,也为了消除道德风险的阴影,贝尔斯登的命运必然导致雷曼兄弟的处境更加糟糕。正如盖特纳和保尔森所解释的那样,华盛顿“没有政治意愿”救助雷曼兄弟。3

The rationales offered subsequently for allowing Lehman to go bust differed markedly from those offered at the time. Later, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke argued that there was a legal obstacle – under section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act – to lending to Lehman as much as he believed was necessary ($12 billion):* ‘Lehman did not have enough collateral to allow the Fed to lend it enough to meet that run.’ At the time, however, the argument was the practical one – a matter of judgment, not law – that ‘investors and counterparties had had time to take precautionary measures’.2 Tim Geithner of the New York Fed declined a request from Lehman management to turn their firm into a bank holding company, in order to make it eligible for Fed assistance. It may be that Paulson believed that by standing aside he could bluff the ‘heads of family’ (the CEOs of the big commercial banks) into bailing Lehman out in much the same way as the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management had been bailed out in 1998. If so, he did not succeed. Most people – certainly most senior people at Lehman – assumed that the fate of Bear Stearns provided a precedent for government intervention. They failed to see that exactly the opposite was true; for political reasons, and to placate the spectre of moral hazard, the fate of Bear Stearns necessitated a worse fate for Lehman. As Geithner and Paulson explained, there was ‘no political will in Washington for a bailout’ of Lehman.3

财政部和美联储官员低估了这场灾难的经济规模——即便他们认为这场灾难在政治上不可避免——这一点毋庸置疑。除此之外,他们后来对摩根士丹利和高盛(这两家公司被赋予了银行控股公司的地位)的处理方式,彻底驳斥了美联储在法律上别无选择,只能任由雷曼兄弟破产的说法。雷曼兄弟真的与美林证券(在雷曼兄弟破产前夕被出售给了美国银行)、保险巨头美国国际集团(AIG,9月16日获得了1820亿美元的救助,这令其最大的交易对手银行松了一口气)以及商业贷款机构华盛顿互惠银行(9月25日被联邦存款保险公司接管)有那么大的区别吗?很难看出其中的一致性。这里讨论的是政策问题。辩护方的唯一论点是,必须发生灾难性的事件才能说服国会采取严厉的财政措施,而规模更大的机构倒闭后果会更严重。即便如此,雷曼兄弟破产案仍然是“美国历史上规模最大、最复杂、涉及面最广、影响最深远的破产案”,其中包含80个独立的破产程序,主要破产程序涉及66000项索赔,总额超过8730亿美元。更重要的是,由于雷曼兄弟是国际金融网络中一个极其重要的节点,它的破产不仅在美国,而且在全球范围内引发了金融恐慌。一种看待这场危机的方式是将其视为一场经典的恐慌:如果像雷曼兄弟这样声誉卓著的银行都会倒闭,那么还有哪家银行是安全的呢?雷曼兄弟破产两天后,一位财经记者前往花旗银行分行取款,却惊讶地发现“排着长队,都是衣着光鲜的华尔街人士。他们和我一样都在取款。隔壁的摩根大通银行也挤满了神情焦虑的银行家。”为了避免加剧恐慌,他选择不报道自己的经历。6

That officials at the Treasury and the Fed underestimated the economic scale of the disaster – even if they were right that it was politically an unavoidable one – is surely beyond doubt. Apart from anything else, their later treatment of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs (which were granted bank holding company status) gave the lie to the argument that, legally, the Fed had no alternative but to let Lehman fail. Was Lehman really so different from Merrill Lynch (which was sold to Bank of America on the eve of the Lehman bankruptcy), the insurance giant AIG (which was bailed out on 16 September to the tune of $182 billion, much to the relief of the banks who were its largest counter-parties)4 and the commercial lender Washington Mutual (which was placed in receivership with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation on 25 September)? It is hard to discern a consistent policy here. The only argument for the defence is that something cataclysmic was necessary to persuade Congress that drastic fiscal action was imperative, and that the failure of a bigger institution would have been even worse. Even so, the Lehman bankruptcy was ‘the largest, most complex, multi-faceted and far-reaching bankruptcy case ever filed in the United States’, with 80 distinct insolvency proceedings and 66,000 claims in the main bankruptcy proceeding, exceeding $873 billion in total. More importantly, because Lehman was a highly central node in the international financial network, its bankruptcy precipitated a cascade of financial panic not just in the United States but around the world.5 The alternative way to think of the crisis is as a classic panic: if a bank as reputable as Lehman could fail, then was any bank safe? One financial journalist who went to withdraw his savings from a branch of Citibank two days after the Lehman bankruptcy was startled to find ‘a long queue, all well-dressed Wall Streeters. They were doing the same as me. Next door, Chase was also full of anxious-looking bankers.’ Rather than fuel the panic, he opted not to report on his experience.6


你不需要经济学博士学位就能理解银行挤兑。你只需要看过电影《欢乐满人间》(Mary Poppins)。2007年11月,美国政策制定者就已收到雷曼兄弟副董事长的明确警告:信贷紧缩迫使银行将各种“意外”资产重新纳入资产负债表,并承担高达1150亿美元的损失,银行正面临巨大压力。然而,联邦公开市场委员会随后的会议和电话会议记录显示,美联储主席本·伯南克及其同事对雷曼兄弟倒闭引发的恐慌感到多么不知所措。诚然,伯南克很快意识到雷曼兄弟倒闭对海外的影响,并迅速批准了大规模的货币互换额度(短期贷款),以确保其他央行拥有应对危机所需的全部美元。各自市场也出现了类似的现金抢购潮。8委员会很快意识到,雷曼兄弟的倒闭不仅对竞争对手摩根士丹利和高盛构成威胁,也对货币市场基金构成威胁;因此,一级交易商信贷机制迅速扩大,允许使用几天前雷曼兄弟拒绝的抵押品类型。9大多数成员现在都明白,开放式承诺比设定任意上限的承诺更有效。10正如威廉·达德利(时任公开市场账户经理)所说:“我认为这里最重要的是——也是我们努力的目标——是信誉。在危机中,你需要足够的力量——比市场认为解决问题所需的力量更大。” 11

You do not need a PhD in economics to understand a bank run. You only need to have seen the movie Mary Poppins. In November 2007 American policymakers had been clearly warned – by the vice-chairman of Lehman – that banks were coming under intense pressure as the credit crunch forced them to take all kinds of ‘unanticipated’ assets back on to their balance sheets and to absorb losses of up to $115 billion.7 Nevertheless, the transcripts of the subsequent meetings and conference calls of the Federal Open Market Committee show how flummoxed Fed Chair Ben Bernanke and his colleagues were by the panic that followed the Lehman failure. True, Bernanke was quick to understand the overseas impact of the bank’s collapse and hastened to secure authorization for large swap lines – short-term loans – to ensure that other central banks had all the dollars they needed to cope with similar dashes for cash in their own markets.8 The committee was also quick to see that the failure of Lehman implied danger not only for its competitors, Morgan Stanley and Goldman, but also for money market funds; hence the speed with which the Primary Dealer Credit Facility was broadened to allow types of collateral that just days before had been refused when Lehman offered them.9 The majority of members now understood that open-ended commitments would be more effective than ones with arbitrary caps.10 As William Dudley (then manager of the open market account) put it, ‘I think the important thing here – and what we’re going for – is credibility. In a crisis you need enough force – more force than the market thinks is necessary to solve the problem.’11

然而,美联储自身预测模型的惯性无疑阻碍了委员会的决策。美联储首席经济学家戴维·J·斯托克顿9月16日向联邦公开市场委员会(FOMC)报告称:“我认为我们的基本前景并未发生重大变化,而且我们预测背后的逻辑是……我们仍然预期未来一年GDP增​​长将非常缓慢地回升。” 然而,事态的发展将使这一说法以及类似的说法沦为笑柄。伯南克当时已经意识到美国经济已经陷入衰退,但斯托克顿乐观的预测却帮助说服了委员会的大多数成员反对降息,仿佛短期通胀仍然令人担忧似的。在当时,只有少数人真正意识到美联储立场的脆弱性。正如波士顿联储的埃里克·S·罗森格伦所言:

Yet the committee was undoubtedly hampered by the inertia of the Fed’s own forecasting models. ‘I don’t think we’ve seen a significant change in the basic outlook,’ reported Fed Chief Economist David J. Stockton to the FOMC on 16 September, ‘and certainly the story behind our forecast is . . . that we’re still expecting a very gradual pickup in GDP growth over the next year.’ Events would make a mockery of this and similar statements.12 Bernanke grasped that the US economy was already in recession, but Stockton’s sanguine forecast helped persuade a majority of committee members to oppose a rate cut, as if there were still any serious reason to worry about near-term inflation. Only a few people in the room appreciated at this early stage the truly exposed nature of the Fed’s position. In the revealing words of Eric S. Rosengren of the Boston Fed:

我认为现在判断我们对雷曼兄弟的处理是否正确还为时尚早。鉴于财政部不愿注资,我们别无选择。但我们当时是经过深思熟虑的。如果货币市场基金出现挤兑,或者非政府三方回购市场关闭,那么这笔投资的回报可能就远不如预期了。考虑到当时的种种限制,我认为我们的做法是正确的。我希望我们能够渡过难关。一周……我们不应该把整个经济的命运押在一两家机构上。上周末我们就处于这种境地。13

I think it’s too soon to know whether what we did with Lehman is right. Given that the Treasury didn’t want to put money in, what happened was that we had no choice. But we took a calculated bet. If we have a run on the money market funds or if the nongovernment tri-party repo market shuts down, that bet may not look nearly so good. I think we did the right thing given the constraints that we had. I hope we get through this week. . . . [W]e shouldn’t be in a position where we’re betting the economy on one or two institutions. That is the situation we were in last weekend.13

伯南克坦率地承认,在缺乏解决陷入困境的“系统重要性”机构的既定规则,以及没有明确迹象表明国会可以进行多少财政干预的情况下,这种临时性的决策方式让他感到“非常困惑和迷茫” 。14

Bernanke candidly admitted that he felt ‘decidedly confused and very muddled’ about the ad hoc way in which decisions were being made in the absence of any agreed rules for resolving ‘systematically important’ institutions that got into difficulties, and with no clear indication of how much fiscal intervention could be expected from Congress.14

由于美联储最新数据滞后于迅速加深的危机,联邦公开市场委员会(FOMC)成员的历史知识在很大程度上发挥了作用。而这种知识水平参差不齐。明尼阿波利斯联邦储备银行行长加里·斯特恩当时63岁,是会场上年纪最大的成员之一。9月16日,他称之为“我职业生涯中见过的最严重的金融危机”(38岁的凯文·沃什后来开玩笑说,这是他“记忆中最艰难的经济时期[笑声]”)。以下是FOMC成员最初提出的历史类比:

With the Fed’s most recent data lagging the rapidly deepening crisis, much turned out to depend on the historical knowledge of members of the FOMC. This was variable. At 63, Gary Stern, chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, was among the oldest people in the room. On 16 September he called it ‘the most severe financial crisis, certainly, that I have seen in my career’ (38-year-old Kevin Warsh later joked that it was ‘the toughest economic period I can remember in his lifetime [laughter]’). Here is a list of the historical analogies initially offered by FOMC members:

2003 年 3 月(伊拉克战争前夕)——芝加哥联邦储备银行的查尔斯·L·埃文斯于 9 月 16 日表示。

March 2003 (the eve of the Iraq invasion) – Charles L. Evans, of the Chicago Fed, on 16 September.

自 1990 年以来,日本——伯南克于 9 月 16 日;圣路易斯联储主席詹姆斯·布拉德于 10 月 28 日以及此后多次。

Japan since 1990 – Bernanke on 16 September; also James Bullard of the St. Louis Fed on 28 October and repeatedly thereafter.

20 世纪 90 年代初的斯堪的纳维亚——伯南克于 9 月 16 日;布拉德于 10 月 28 日。

Scandinavia in the early 1990s – Bernanke on 16 September; also Bullard on 28 October.

“这与 1987 年股市崩盘或 1970 年商业票据危机不同”——伯南克 10 月 7 日表示。

‘It’s not like the 1987 stock market crash or the 1970 commercial paper crisis’ – Bernanke on 7 October.

“一个可能的类比是 1980 年卡特政府的信贷管制,当时政府宣布了一项看似收紧信贷的措施”——伯南克 10 月 29 日。

‘One possible analogy is the 1980 Carter credit controls, when the government announced what seemed to be a tightening of credit’ – Bernanke on 29 October.

布拉德不止一次提到需要进行“类似沃尔克式的变革,类似于——尽管情况有所不同——1979年的那次声明”,那次声明震撼了……私营部门先入为主地认为,它们应该引发对名义利率公告的所有反应。15

Bullard referred more than once to the need for ‘a Volcker-like transformation, something like – although the situation is different – the ’79 announcement, which knocked private-sector priors off the idea that they should trigger all reactions to announcements on nominal interest rates’.15

“[德国银行]赫尔施塔特,1974 年;纽约市的破产,1975 年;1987 年;以及日本发生的事情”——罗森格伦 9 月 16 日。

‘[The German bank] Herstatt, 1974; New York City’s failure, 1975; 1987; and what happened in Japan’ – Rosengren on 16 September.

最后,也是最出人意料的,是十四世纪的瘟疫,正如达拉斯联邦储备银行的理查德·费舍尔所说,“当时主宰社会的僧侣们回归了从古希腊人那里学来的古老正统教义……他们没有学习修女们所学习的,也就是从实践中学习到的东西。” 16

Finally, and improbably, the plague of the fourteenth century because, in the words of Richard Fisher of the Dallas Fed, ‘the monks in that period, who dominated society, reverted to the old orthodoxy learned from the Greeks . . . they did not learn what the nuns learned, which is what you learn from practice.’16

这些类比都没什么用。除了最后一个之外,其他所有类比都低估了危机的严重程度。

None of these analogies was of much use. All – except perhaps the last one – understated the scale of the crisis.

令人惊讶的是,直到10月7日才首次提及大萧条,而且是里士满联储的杰弗里·拉克尔提出的。他质疑“我们现在看到的究竟是交易对手方面真正的根本性不确定性,还是我们的贷款就像推绳子一样徒劳无功——借用大萧条时期的另一个比喻”。伯南克对此只回应道:“杰夫,你引用凯恩斯的话啊。” 17 直到10月29日,在暗示他们正面临二战以来最严重的经济衰退之后,伯南克本人才做出了如下冷静的判断:

Surprisingly, the first mention of the Great Depression did not come until 7 October, and it came from Jeffrey Lacker of the Richmond Fed, who wondered ‘whether what we’re seeing is genuine fundamental uncertainty about counterparties and whether our lending is the equivalent of pushing on a string, to use another metaphor from the Great Depression’. ‘Quoting Keynes, I see, Jeff’ was Bernanke’s sole comment.17 It was not until 29 October, after suggesting they were now facing the worst recession since the war, that Bernanke himself offered the following sober judgment:

有人将这种情况与1990年的日本情况相提并论。我开始怀疑这或许并非好事。日本的优势首先在于其相对封闭。当时世界其他地区经济状况良好,日本能够从出口和全球经济中汲取力量。尽管日本经济增长缓慢,但从未真正经历过严重的经济衰退或失业率大幅上升。我认为我们现在面临的情况是……或许还会出现更严重的情况,我们面临的挑战是确保这种情况不会持续太久。

我认为,无论是日本、20世纪30年代还是其他经验,都给我们带来一个教训:被动并非解决之道。18

There has been some comparison of this to the Japanese situation [in 1990]. I’m beginning to wonder if that might not be a good outcome. The advantage of the Japanese was, first of all, that they were isolated. The rest of the world was doing okay, and they were able to draw strength from their exports and the rest of the global economy. Although they had very slow growth, they never really had a deep recession or big increases in unemployment. I think we are looking at perhaps a much sharper episode, and our challenge will be to make sure that it doesn’t persist longer.

I do think that one lesson of both Japan and the 1930s as well as other experiences is that passivity is not a good answer.18

经济学家们不时试图将讨论拉回到他们钟爱的宏观经济模型上。然而,随着时间的推移,委员会成员对这种方法越来越不屑一顾。“我们没有任何模型可以借鉴,因为我们没有任何数据能够揭示利率利差与货币基础数量之间的结构性关系,”拉克尔在12月15日指出。“我们将在新体制下摸索前进,我们必须认真思考,并做出一些猜测——通过反复试验……” 19 10月29日,当伯南克试图总结立场时,他援引的是金融史,而不是模型:

Periodically, the staff economists sought to return the discussion to their beloved macro model. Yet over time committee members grew more dismissive of this approach. ‘We don’t have any models to draw on because we don’t have any data that would allow us to uncover a structural relationship between [interest-rate] spreads and the quantity of the [monetary] base,’ noted Lacker on 15 December. ‘We are going to grope and try to find our way in this new regime, and we are going to have to think hard about it and make some guesses – by trial and error . . .’19 When Bernanke sought to sum up the position on 29 October, it was to financial history, not to a model, that he appealed:

历史表明,每当金融危机严重到一定程度,最终唯一的解决办法就是财政刺激,而我们也终将面临财政刺激。有两种可能。一种是金融体系勉强渡过难关,在这种情况下,财政刺激措施将与我们已经看到的类似:注入资金、扶持关键企业、支持信贷市场整体;凯恩斯式的需求刺激。这是一种可能性。我希望我们最终会走到这一步……我还想补充一点,止赎、房屋所有权以及其他一些相关问题也需要解决……

当然,另一种可能性是情况会变得更糟,我们会陷入与瑞典或日本相同的境地,在这种情况下,对银行体系进行大规模资本重组是必要的。这种情况最终会发生,但我只想指出,在所有这些情况下……财政动态中存在政治经济因素。你必须确保,采取财政支持政策不仅是正确的,而且在政治上也是可行的。20

History suggests that, whenever a financial crisis becomes sufficiently severe, ultimately the only solution is a fiscal solution, and we will have a fiscal solution. There are two possibilities. One is that the financial system will muddle through, in which case the fiscal solution will be of the sort we’ve already seen: injections of capital, support for critical firms, support for the credit markets in general; Keynesian-style demand support. That’s one possibility. I hope that’s where we’re going to be. . . . I would add, foreclosure, homeownership, and some of those issues as well. . . .

The other possibility, of course, is that things get much worse and that we are in the same situation as Sweden or Japan, in which case a massive recapitalization of the banking system will be necessary. That will eventually happen, but I just note that, in all of these fiscal dynamics, there is a political economy overlay. You have to get to the point that it is not only the right policy to induce fiscal support but also that it is politically possible.20

到12月中旬,达德利甚至提出“违约率可能会超过大萧条时期” 。21

By mid-December, Dudley went so far as to suggest ‘that we could have default rates greater than those of the Great Depression’.21

随着2008年接近尾声,尽管采取了越来越大胆的措施,美国经济仍呈现出自由落体式下滑的迹象。这些措施尤其引人注目,包括国会在10月3日第二次尝试后通过的“问题资产救助计划”(TARP)。该计划最初授权财政部购买或担保高达7000亿美元的“问题资产”。此外,美联储还扩大了其定期拍卖机制,这是向银行系统提供美元的多种手段之一。关于向存放在美联储的银行准备金支付利息的影响,各方展开了广泛的讨论,最早可追溯到9月29日的联邦公开市场委员会(FOMC)电话会议。 22 同样引发讨论的还有美联储资产负债表的快速增长,其规模在9月10日至年底之间翻了一番以上。23 “量化宽松”——一种资产购买措施,最早由日本央行于2001年使用——​​于10月28日首次被提及。24 12月15日,伯南克提出了设定明确的通胀目标(其他央行自20世纪90年代以来一直在使用这一工具)的想法。25然而,讨论最激烈的问题是联邦基金利率的“零下限”问题——即美联储的基准短期利率不能为负——以及利率应以多快的速度降至最低水平。26最后,还就紧急措施发挥作用后在某个时候需要采取的“退出策略”进行了一些有限的讨论。27讨论中的政策创新如此之多,以至于达拉斯联储的理查德·费舍尔担心,它们可能会“被视为从米尔顿·弗里德曼和约翰·泰勒(斯坦福大学经济学家,以其货币政策规则而闻名)的守护神转向新的守护神——鲁布·戈德堡。[笑声]” 28

As 2008 drew to a close, the US economy showed more and more signs of being in freefall, despite increasingly bold measures, notably the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) passed by Congress at the second attempt on 3 October – which initially empowered the Treasury to purchase or insure up to $700 billion of ‘troubled assets’ – and the expansion of the Fed’s term auction facility, which was one of several devices employed to provide dollars to the banking system. The implications of paying interest on bank reserves held at the Fed were widely debated, beginning with an FOMC conference call on 29 September.22 So too were the implications of the very rapid growth of the Fed’s balance sheet, which more than doubled between 10 September and the end of the year.23 The first reference to ‘quantitative easing’ – an asset-buying measure first used by the Bank of Japan in 2001 – came on 28 October.24 The idea of setting an explicit inflation target (a tool used by other central banks since the 1990s) was raised by Bernanke on 15 December.25 The most hotly discussed issue, however, was the problem of the ‘zero lower bound’ for the Fed funds rate – the fact that the Fed’s benchmark short-term rate could not be negative – and how swiftly the rate should be cut to its minimum level.26 Finally, there was some limited discussion of the ‘exit strategies’ that would at some point be needed when emergency measures had served their purpose.27 So numerous were the policy innovations under discussion that Richard Fisher of the Dallas Fed worried that they might be ‘at risk of being perceived as migrating from the patron saints of Milton Friedman and John Taylor [the Stanford economist best known for his monetary policy rule] to a new patron saint – Rube Goldberg. [Laughter]’28

然而,最终说服联邦公开市场委员会(FOMC)中最持怀疑态度的成员支持这些创新举措的关键论点,却是一个历史性的论点:否则,经济大萧条可能会重演。在这方面,有两点值得注意。首先,伯南克主席很少明确运用他在20世纪30年代金融史方面的专业知识(作为一名学者,他曾对银行倒闭的负面后果进行过开创性研究),尽管这显然是他考虑的重点。其次,在讨论中,一位同时拥有经济学和国际政治背景的人士发挥了决定性作用。10月29日,针对那些反对联邦基金利率下调50个基点的人士,纽约联储主席蒂莫西·盖特纳慷慨激昂地呼吁采取行动:

Yet the crucial argument that persuaded even the most sceptical members of the FOMC to support these innovations was an historical one: that the alternative might be to re-run the Great Depression. Two points are striking in this connection. The first is how little explicit use Chairman Bernanke made of his expertise in the financial history of the 1930s (as an academic, he had done pioneering research on the negative consequences of bank failures), though it was clearly at the back of his mind. The second is the decisive role in the discussions played by the one man at the table whose background combined economics and international politics. On 29 October, in response to those opposed to a 50-basis-point cut in the Fed funds rate, New York Fed President Timothy Geithner argued passionately for action:

我认为在当前形势下,货币政策渐进主义并无合理理由。风险太大。如果我们过于谨慎,对金融体系和实体经济造成的损害可能会更大,也更难纠正。如果我们最终行动过猛,总可以进行调整。这更容易解决,只需要决心。鉴于全球金融市场越来越重视严重的全球衰退,那些“保持警惕”和“保留剩余弹药”的论点在我看来并不那么有说服力。29

I don’t see a good case for monetary policy gradualism in the current context. The risks are too great. If we’re too tentative, the damage to the financial system and to the real economy could be much greater and much harder to correct. If we end up doing too much, we can always adjust. That’s an easier problem to solve. It just requires will. With global financial markets placing progressively more weight on a very severe global recession, the ‘keep our powder dry’ and ‘reserve our remaining ammunition’ arguments don’t seem that compelling to me.29

到 2008 年底,委员会的大多数成员都确信,任何能够避免第二次大萧条的政策都应该尝试,即使国会提供的财政刺激不足,即使量化宽松最终可能导致高于预期水平的通货膨胀。

By the end of 2008 most members of the committee had been convinced that any policy capable of averting a second Great Depression should be tried, even if there were insufficient fiscal stimulus being provided by Congress and even if QE might ultimately lead to higher than desirable inflation.


让雷曼兄弟破产是个错误吗?正如我们所见,当局的决策显然缺乏一致性。他们显然低估了放任雷曼兄弟破产的更广泛影响。大多数市场利率在雷曼兄弟破产后都大幅上涨。破产公告发布后,伦敦银行间同业拆借利率(Libor)暴跌333个基点。雷曼兄弟破产后的两天内,银行发行的商业票据市场崩溃,一周内约有5000亿美元的短期资金从金融体系中消失。资产支持商业票据市场同样遭受重创,迫使银行从“渠道”(影子银行)收回约1.3万亿美元的资产。 9月16日,大型货币市场基金Reserve Primary因从雷曼兄弟购入的无担保商业票据遭受损失而跌破面值。总之,市场出现了大规模挤兑,挤兑对象并非银行(银行存款受20世纪30年代引入的联邦保险制度保护),而是任何其他持有短期负债的金融机构。对雷曼兄弟公司签发的数千亿美元信用违约互换合约的损失也导致信用违约互换市场暂时冻结。

Was it a mistake to let Lehman fail? As we have seen, there was certainly nothing consistent about the decisions the authorities took. They manifestly underestimated the wider ramifications of letting Lehman go. Most market interest rates jumped after the bankruptcy announcement – by 333 basis points in the case of the London interbank offered rate, or ‘Libor’. In the two days following Lehman’s bankruptcy, the market for commercial paper issued by banks collapsed, removing around $500 billion of short-term funding from the system within a week. The asset-backed commercial paper market fared equally badly, forcing banks to take around $1.3 trillion back on to their balance sheets from the ‘conduits’ (shadow banks) where the assets had been held.30 Reserve Primary – a large money market fund – ‘broke the buck’ on 16 September because of losses on unsecured commercial paper it had bought from Lehman.31 In sum, there was a massive run, not so much on banks (where deposits were protected by the federal insurance introduced in the 1930s) but on any other kind of financial institution with short-term liabilities. Losses on hundreds of billions of credit default swaps written against Lehman also caused a temporary seizure in the CDS market.

另一方面,股市10月份的跌幅比9月份更为严重。伦敦银行间同业拆借利率(Libor)与三个月期国债利率之间的利差在10月份飙升至450个基点以上,而非9月份。对投资者而言,比雷曼兄弟倒闭更具冲击力的是伯南克和保尔森9月23日在参议院银行委员会的证词缺乏说服力,以及9月29日国会就不良资产救助计划(TARP)进行的首次投票。当时,众议院以205票对228票否决了这项救助方案。32 如果不放松货币政策,”布什总统在投票前四天告诉国会领导人,“这笔交易可能会失败。”(《洋葱报》对此的报道标题为“布什呼吁恐慌”。)2008年最后一个季度,私人国内投资和个人消费支出均大幅下降,导致GDP年化降幅超过5%。12月份工业生产大幅下滑。今年最后两个月,美国失去了超过一百万个工作岗位。2009年第一季度的情况更加糟糕。即使救助了雷曼兄弟,也未必能阻止经济活动的急剧下滑。事实上,救助了雷曼兄弟之后,政府可能发现自己在政治上无力救助规模更大的机构。

On the other hand, the decline in the stock market was more severe in October than in September. The spread between Libor and the rate on three-month Treasury bills spiked to more than 450 basis points in October, not September. More traumatic for investors than Lehman’s failure were the unconvincing appearances of Bernanke and Paulson before the Senate Banking Committee on 23 September and Congress’s first votes on TARP on 29 September, when the House rejected the bail-out package by 228 votes to 205.32 ‘If money isn’t loosened up,’ President Bush had told congressional leaders four days before the vote, ‘this sucker could go down.’ (‘Bush Calls for Panic’ was The Onion’s version of the story.) The last quarter of 2008 saw steep declines in both private domestic investment and personal consumption expenditures, driving GDP down at an annualized rate of over 5 per cent. Industrial production plunged in December. More than a million American jobs were lost in the last two months of the year. The first quarter of 2009 was even worse. It is doubtful that a rescue of Lehman would have averted this severe decline in economic activity. Indeed, having saved Lehman, the government might have found itself politically unable to bail out an even larger institution.

同样重要的是要记住,这场危机是如何迅速从美国的信贷紧缩演变为全球崩溃的。跨境资本流动几乎完全枯竭,从峰值到谷底下降了约82%。国际商业信贷也急剧萎缩。贸易暴跌,航运也随之瘫痪。2008年末,全球工业生产下滑了约14%。将这些指标与其他指标与始于1929年9月的危机的相应指标进行比较,令人不寒而栗:2008年9月至2009年6月期间的种种迹象表明,这无疑是第二次大萧条。此外,其中还存在着某种严重的不公。尽管这场全球金融危机起源于美国,但它最初对其他经济体的打击比美国更为严重,尤其是那些更依赖出口收入的经济体(例如台湾、日本和泰国),以及一些东欧国家(特别是匈牙利)。就失业而言,我们将会看到,危机爆发几年后,南欧将遭受最严重的苦难,那里距离华盛顿特区的决策者们有五千英里之遥。

It is also important to remember how very rapidly the crisis mutated from an American credit crunch into a global collapse. Cross-border capital flows all but dried up, falling by around 82 per cent from peak to trough. International commercial credit also contracted sharply. Trade nosedived, and with it shipping. In late 2008, global industrial production slumped by around 14 per cent. It was chilling to compare these and other indicators with their equivalents for the crisis that had begun in September 1929: nothing between September 2008 and June 2009 indicated that this was anything less than the second Great Depression.33 Moreover, there was a certain rough injustice at work. Though American in origin, the global financial crisis initially hit other economies harder than the United States, especially those (such as Taiwan, Japan and Thailand) with a greater reliance on export earnings, as well as some East European countries (notably Hungary). In terms of unemployment, as we shall see, the worst misery would be suffered several years into the crisis in southern Europe, five thousand miles away from the decision-makers of Washington, DC.

经济学家们大多未能预测到这场危机,如今在预测经济复苏方面也同样失算。2008年10月,国际货币基金组织预测2009年全球经济实际增长率将达到1.9%。但最终的准确数字却是-0.15%。奥巴马新政府乐观地预测,美国经济增长率将从2009年的-1.2%上升到2010年的3.2%,并且在接下来的三年里都将超过4%。然而,根据美国经济分析局的数据,实际增长率分别为2009年的-2.5%,以及随后几年的2.6%、1.6%、2.2%和1.8%。此后,美国经济学家们年复一年地预测未来一年的增长率将超过3.5%或4%,然后在接下来的24个月里不断下调他们的预测。同样的情况也适用于国际货币基金组织和其他机构对世界经济整体的预测。这些错误预测的一个后果是,许多政策制定者……人们被劝说放弃采取大胆措施,因为他们相信经济复苏指日可待。

Economists, having mostly failed to predict the crisis, now did an equally bad job of predicting the recovery. In October 2008, the International Monetary Fund forecast that the global economy would grow in real terms by 1.9 per cent in 2009. The correct figure proved to be –0.15 per cent. The incoming administration of Barack Obama optimistically projected that the US growth rate would rise from –1.2 per cent in 2009 to 3.2 per cent in 2010, with the next three years all above 4 per cent. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the actual numbers were –2.5 per cent in 2009 followed by 2.6, 1.6, 2.2 and 1.8 per cent in the succeeding years. Year after year, US economists would project growth above 3.5 or 4 per cent for the next year but one, then spend the next twenty-four months revising their forecasts downwards. The same applied to the predictions of the IMF and others for the world economy as a whole. One consequence of these wrong forecasts was that many policymakers were persuaded to forgo bold measures in the belief that recovery was just around the corner.

全球金融危机的宏观经济总成本远高于“9·11”恐怖袭击后爆发的“反恐战争”,尤其考虑到如果世界经济继续沿着既定趋势持续增长,其产出将会更高。仅美国一国的损失估计就高达5.7万亿至13万亿美元,而阿富汗和伊拉克战争的最高成本估计为4万亿美元。 34然而,战争的成本不成比例地由参战人员及其直系亲属承担。金融危机的成本则分布更为广泛。可以合理地推断,在美国,金融危机及其引发的经济衰退导致至少500万人失业(2008年5月至2009年6月期间的净失业人数增加),以及约550万套房屋被取消抵押赎回权。 2007年至2012年间,全球约有2800万人失业。在一些受影响最严重的国家,例如希腊,青年失业率尤其高企。而且,其中大部分是长期失业:在发达经济体,2012年约有三分之一的青年失业者失业时间至少为六个月。许多年长的劳动者灰心丧气,干脆放弃求职,退出了劳动力市场。在受灾严重的国家,医疗保健和其他公共服务的支出被削减。来自大西洋两岸的证据都表明,许多低收入家庭在从食品到药品等必需品上都不得不节约开支。发达经济体的公共和私人紧缩政策对其他地区产生了诸多连锁反应,尤其显著的是,流向贫困国家的汇款和援助减少了。对许多人来说,这些年如同蝗灾肆虐。《经济学人》计算出了“损失的时间”——即受危机重创的国家经济倒退的年数。希腊的经济倒退了十二年多,爱尔兰、意大利、葡萄牙和西班牙倒退了七到九年,英国倒退了八年,美国倒退了十年。35

The aggregate macroeconomic costs of the global financial crisis were larger than those of the ‘war on terror’ that began after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, especially if one imagines the output there would have been had the world economy continued growing uninterruptedly along its trend path. Plausible estimates for the cost to the United States alone range from $5.7 to $13 trillion, compared with a maximum estimate of the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq of $4 trillion.34 The costs of wars, however, are borne disproportionately by the people who do the fighting and their immediate families. The costs of financial crises are more widely distributed. It seems reasonable to say that, in the United States, the financial crisis and the recession it caused led to at least 5 million job losses (the net increase in unemployment between May 2008 and June 2009) and around 5.5 million foreclosures. Around the world, about 28 million people lost their jobs between 2007 and 2012. In some of the worst-affected countries – such as Greece – youth unemployment rose especially high. And much of this was long-term unemployment: in advanced economies, around a third of all young unemployed people in 2012 had been out of a job for at least six months. Many older workers grew disheartened and simply gave up looking for employment, leaving the workforce. In badly affected countries, public spending on health care and other services was cut. Evidence from both sides of the Atlantic shows that many lower-income families economized on essentials, from food to medication. Public and private austerity in advanced economies had numerous knock-on effects elsewhere, notably reduced remittances and aid going to poor countries. For many people, these were locust years. The Economist computed a measure of ‘lost time’ – that is, the number of years the economic clock turned back for countries hit hard by the crisis. In Greece the economic clock has been turned back by more than twelve years, in Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain by seven to nine years, in the United Kingdom by eight years, and in the United States by a decade.35

然而,即使是这些统计数据也远不足以展现这场危机给人类带来的苦难:无数逝去的生命岁月。尽管大西洋两岸的福利项目在很大程度上缓解了危机对个人和家庭的影响,但人们仍然遭受着巨大的苦难和屈辱。一位女性的遭遇,代表着千百万人的苦难,一位生活在帕特莫斯岛的希腊母亲:

Yet even those statistics convey too little of the human misery inflicted by the crisis: the lost years of individual lives. Although welfare programs on both sides of the Atlantic did much to mitigate the impacts of the crisis on individuals and families, there was still a great deal of hardship and humiliation. One woman must stand for millions, a Greek mother on the island of Patmos:

她的丈夫失业后回到岛上,想和两个孩子团聚并找份工作。然而,他最终还是失败了,而她又不幸罹患癌症,他们的积蓄彻底耗尽。银行收回了他们的房子,他们甚至连电费都交不起。她感到羞愧……六个月前,她做梦也想不到自己会沦落到需要依靠慈善救济的地步,但今天,她真的需要帮助了。36

Her husband had lost his job and come back to the island to be with their two children and find work. After he failed and she fell ill with cancer, they ran out of money. The bank seized their house; they could not pay the electricity bill. She was ashamed . . . Six months ago she would never have dreamt she would come to depend on charity, but today she needed help.36

混沌理论的先驱爱德华·洛伦兹曾提出一个著名的论断:巴西一只蝴蝶扇动翅膀就能在德克萨斯州引发龙卷风。那么,我们是否应该类比地认为,一家美国投资银行的倒闭就能让这位女士以及数百万与她境遇相似的人陷入贫困,不得不依赖慈善救济呢?这并非像听起来那么荒谬:全球金融体系如同天气一样,是一个确定性的非线性系统,其中相对较小的扰动就能引发不成比例的巨大动荡。然而,正如我们将看到的,过分重视单一的破产事件是错误的。雷曼兄弟的倒闭既是全球金融体系普遍危机的征兆,也是其根本原因。

Edward Lorenz, the pioneer of chaos theory, famously suggested that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas. Are we to believe, by analogy, that the failure of a single American investment bank could reduce this woman, and millions like her, to poverty and dependence on charity? This is not as implausible as it sounds: like the weather, the global financial system is a deterministic non-linear system, in which a relatively small perturbation can generate a disproportionately large upheaval. Yet, as we shall see, it would be a mistake to attach excessive importance to a single bankruptcy. Lehman’s failure was as much a symptom as a cause of a generalized crisis of the global financial system.

原因再探

Causes Revisited

金融星球究竟出了什么问题?银行家们坚称这不是他们的错。摩根大通首席执行官杰米·戴蒙将金融危机描述为“每五到七年就会发生一次的事情。我们不应该感到惊讶。” 37 高盛首席执行官劳埃德·布兰克费恩也持相同观点。他更早地意识到2008-2009年事件的规模之大。他说,这是一场规模空前的飓风,但却是任何人都无法预料的。“我们应该抵制那种仅仅为了保护我们免受百年一遇风暴侵袭而制定的应对措施。” 38不言而喻,这种观点在华尔街董事会之外几乎无人支持。一种更为流行的解释是,罪魁祸首是银行家的贪婪。记者马特·泰比(Matt Taibbi)曾用一句令人印象深刻的比喻,将布兰克费恩的银行比作“一只巨大的吸血乌贼,紧紧缠绕着人类的脸庞,无情地将它的吸管插入任何散发着金钱气息的东西”。39那些不了解高盛工作氛围的人,读到31岁的高盛员工法布里斯·图雷的电子邮件时,都感到震惊。图雷设计了一种名为Abacus 2007-AC1的合成抵押债务凭证,帮助对冲基金经理约翰·保尔森做空美国房地产市场。“整栋楼随时都可能倒塌,”在市场暴跌之际,他曾这样告诉女友,“唯一可能的幸存者,就是那位了不起的法布里斯……他身处所有这些复杂、高杠杆、奇异的交易之中,却未必完全理解这些怪物的全部后果!!!

What had gone so wrong on Planet Finance? The bankers were adamant that it was not their fault. The chief executive of JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon, described a financial crisis as something that ‘happens every five to seven years. We shouldn’t be surprised.’37 His counterpart at Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, was readier to recognize the exceptional scale of the events of 2008–9. This was an exceptionally large hurricane, he said, but one that nobody could have predicted. ‘We should resist a response . . . that is solely designed around protecting us from the 100-year storm.’38 Needless to say, such views found little support beyond the boardrooms of Wall Street. A much more popular interpretation was that the greed of the bankers was to blame. In a memorable phrase, the journalist Matt Taibbi dubbed Blankfein’s bank ‘a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money’.39 Those unfamiliar with the working atmosphere at Goldman were appalled to read the emails of 31-year-old Fabrice Tourre, a Goldman Sachs employee who devised a synthetic collateralized debt obligation called Abacus 2007-AC1 to enable hedge-fund manager John Paulson to short the US housing market. ‘The whole building is about to collapse anytime now,’ he told a girlfriend as the markets tumbled and fell. ‘Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab . . . standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstruosities [sic]!!!’

公众对华尔街“狼群”和伦敦金融城“肥猫”不道德行为的愤怒是可以理解的,但这种愤怒的解释力有限。至少自从汤姆·沃尔夫的小说 虚荣的篝火》问世以来,投资银行家贪婪已是公认的事实。然而,该书出版年份——1987年——的股市崩盘,对于大多数金融资产而言,只是长达数十年的牛市中的一个短暂插曲。贪婪和恐惧甚至比金融市场的历史还要悠久。仅凭人性的弱点,无法解释2008年危机的严重程度。

Public anger against the unethical behaviour of the wolves of Wall Street and the fat cats of the City of London was understandable. But its explanatory value was limited. At least since Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, it was a truth universally acknowledged that investment bankers were greedy. Yet the stock market crash in the year that book was published – 1987 – had been a very brief interruption to a multi-decade bull market for most financial assets. Greed and fear are even older than financial markets. Human frailty alone cannot explain the magnitude of the 2008 crisis.

经济学家保罗·克鲁格曼的报纸专栏文章大多未能预见到金融危机的到来,但这并未阻止他在危机爆发后发表措辞强烈的回顾性预测。他认为,这场危机主要是由于一项可以追溯到很久以前的金融放松管制政策造成的。克鲁格曼宣称:“到了20世纪80年代,里根时代的立法改革实际上结束了新政对抵押贷款的限制。”

The economist Paul Krugman’s regular newspaper columns had largely missed the approach of the financial crisis, but that did not hold him back from offering a strongly worded retrospective prediction after it had happened. The crisis, he argued, was primarily the result of a policy of financial deregulation dating back to the 1980s. ‘Reagan-era legislative changes essentially ended New Deal restrictions on mortgage lending,’ Krugman declared:

直到里根放松管制之后,节俭才逐渐从美国人的生活中消失……正是过去25年债务的爆炸式增长,才使得美国经济如此脆弱。一旦房地产泡沫破裂,失业率开始上升,过度负债的借款人必然会开始大规模违约。这些违约反过来又对金融体系造成了严重破坏,而金融体系——也主要由于里根时代的放松管制——承担了过多的风险,却拥有过少的资本。40

It was only after the Reagan deregulation that thrift gradually disappeared from the American way of life. . . . It was the explosion of debt over the previous quarter-century that made the U.S. economy so vulnerable. Overstretched borrowers were bound to start defaulting in large numbers once the housing bubble burst and unemployment began to rise. These defaults in turn wreaked havoc with a financial system that – also mainly thanks to Reagan-era deregulation – took on too much risk with too little capital.40

在另一篇文章中,克鲁格曼深情地回顾了“二战后一段漫长的稳定时期,这段时期建立在存款保险和银行资产负债表严格监管之上,存款保险消除了挤兑的威胁,而银行资产负债表监管包括限制高风险贷款和限制杠杆率,即限制银行用借入资金进行投资的程度”。 41这片宁静祥和的时代的确宛如伊甸园:“乏味的银行业时代也是经济飞速发展的时代”。 42克鲁格曼并非孤军奋战。芝加哥经济学家兼法学家理查德·波斯纳也加入了呼吁恢复1933年《格拉斯-斯蒂格尔法案》的行列。该法案将投资银行与商业银行分开,但于1999年被废除(由克林顿而非里根废除)。 43这为这场灾难提供了一个令人满意的解释:银行家们热切期盼放松管制,他们的游说者积极推动,而贪婪的政客最终促成了这一政策的实施——结果却酿成了灾难性的后果。44

In another column, Krugman looked back fondly to a ‘long period of stability after World War II, [which was] based on a combination of deposit insurance, which eliminated the threat of bank runs, and strict regulation of bank balance sheets, including both limits on risky lending and limits on leverage, the extent to which banks were allowed to finance investments with borrowed funds’.41 This prelapsarian age was indeed an Eden: the ‘era of boring banking was also an era of spectacular economic progress.’42 Krugman was by no means a lone voice. Richard Posner, the Chicago economist and jurist, joined the chorus calling for a restoration of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated investment banking from commercial banking, but had been repealed in 1999 (under Clinton, not Reagan).43 Here was a satisfying explanation for the calamity: deregulation had been fervently wished for by bankers, pursued by their lobbyists and enacted by venal politicians – with disastrous results.44

对英国读者而言,即便对美国读者来说并非如此,这个故事也难免有些牵强。20世纪80年代之前,英国银行业也受到严格监管。然而,当时的经济状况却远称不上“突飞猛进”。1980年以前也并非没有金融危机。恰恰相反,20世纪70年代可以说是英国自20世纪20年代以来金融灾难最为严重的十年,不仅见证了……银行业危机,以及股市崩盘、房地产泡沫、两位数通货膨胀和国际货币基金组织的援助,共同导致了金融危机。无论如何,为什么始于上世纪八九十年代的放松管制政策过了这么久才引发危机?将金融危机归咎于放松管制(或放松管制带来的金融创新)似乎比归咎于银行家的贪婪好不了多少。45

To a British reader, if not to an American, there was something implausible about this story. British banking was also tightly regulated prior to the 1980s. Yet there was anything but ‘spectacular economic progress’. Nor was the pre-1980 period characterized by a lack of financial crises. On the contrary, the seventies were arguably the United Kingdom’s most financially disastrous decade since the 1920s, witnessing not only a major banking crisis, but also a stock market crash, a real estate bubble, double-digit inflation and assistance from the International Monetary Fund. In any case, why did deregulation that dated back to the 1980s and 1990s take so long to produce a crisis? Blaming the financial crisis on deregulation (or on the financial innovations made possible by deregulation) looks only marginally better than blaming it on bankers’ greed.45

本书第一版完成于金融危机全面爆发之前,当时我论证了危机由六个不同的原因造成。首先,银行资本不足,不仅在美国,在欧洲也是如此。其次,私人债务市场受到评级错误的金融产品(例如担保债务凭证)的污染。第三,2002年至2004年间,美国的货币政策过于宽松。第四,美国以及许多其他国家都出现了房地产泡沫。第五,衍生品等新型金融保险的数量激增,极大地复杂化了国际或有义务金融网络。最后,“中美”将亚洲的“过剩”储蓄引入美国经济,在大多数资产市场制造了一种虚假的繁荣。后续研究也倾向于支持这一解释框架。

In the first edition of this book, which was completed before the full scale of the financial crisis had become apparent, I argued that the crisis had six distinct causes. Banks were under-capitalized, not only in the United States but in Europe, too. The private debt market had been contaminated by wrongly rated financial products such as collateralized debt obligations. US monetary policy had been left too loose between 2002 and 2004. A housing bubble had inflated in the United States as well as in many other countries. New forms of financial insurance in the form of derivatives had exploded in quantity, greatly complicating the international financial network of contingent obligations. Finally, ‘Chimerica’ had channelled Asia’s ‘glut’ of savings into the US economy, creating an illusory boom in most asset markets. Subsequent research has tended to support this explanatory framework.

这的确是杠杆时代,尤其是在英语世界,尤其是在最大的几家银行中——当然,这并非仅限于此。 46 1990年至2008年间,美国十大金融机构持有的金融资产份额从10%上升至50%,而银行总数却从15000多家减少到约8000家。到20​​07年底,15家美国银行的总股东权益为8570亿美元,总资产达13.6万亿美元,表外承诺达5.8万亿美元,这意味着总杠杆率约为23:1。 47到2007年,美国五大投资银行中,只有高盛的杠杆率低于30:1。 48过度依赖短期债务融资的机构,随后投资于风险远高于表面水平的资产。危机前增长最快的是各种形式的房地产贷款;这些贷款反过来又成为危机中损失的主要原因;商业贷款的违约率要低得多。

This was indeed the Age of Leverage, especially – though not only – in the English-speaking world and especially among the biggest banks.46 Between 1990 and 2008 the share of financial assets held by the ten largest US financial institutions had risen from 10 per cent to 50 per cent, even as the total number of banks had fallen from more than 15,000 to about 8,000. By the end of 2007, fifteen US banks with combined shareholder equity of $857 billion had total assets of $13.6 trillion and off-balance-sheet commitments of $5.8 trillion, implying a total leverage ratio of around 23 to 1.47 Of the top five US investment banks, by 2007 only Goldman Sachs had a leverage ratio below 30 to 1.48 Institutions that were excessively reliant on short-term debt for financing then invested in assets that were riskier than they appeared. The most rapid growth in the pre-crisis period was in various forms of real estate lending; these loans were in turn the main causes of losses in the crisis; delinquency rates on business loans were much lower.

简单地说“次贷危机是其根源”是对危机本质的误解。2008年6月,美国各银行的资产负债表上持有约2200亿美元的次贷证券,仅占其8.8万亿美元风险资产的2.5%。商业房地产贷款(1.8万亿美元)的规模要大得多。银行在“特殊目的实体”(SPAV)中持有的表外证券化资产敞口也同样庞大,其规模是次贷敞口的两倍多(4800亿美元)。真正的问题在于整体资本的匮乏,因为这意味着银行对这部分小额资产的错误假设足以使其平均损失15%的股本,在受影响最严重的银行,损失甚至高达60%。这种情况与其说是放松管制的结果,不如说是监管相对分散以及政治压力(来自两大政党中的民粹主义势力以及银行游说集团)推动住房所有权的结果。与加拿大相比,美国的银行体系在许多方面都是“设计上的脆弱”。 49

To say simply that ‘subprime mortgages caused the crisis’ is to misunderstand its nature. In June 2008 US banks held around $220 billion in subprime mortgage securities on their balance sheets, which amounted to only 2.5 per cent of their $8.8 trillion of risky assets. Commercial real estate loans ($1.8 trillion) were much larger in scale. So were the banks’ off-balance-sheet exposures to securitized assets in ‘special purpose vehicles’, which amounted to over two times their subprime exposures ($480 billion). It was the overall lack of capital that was the real problem, because that meant that the banks’ faulty assumptions about this small fraction of their assets were enough to wipe out 15 per cent of their equity on average, and up to 60 per cent in the case of the worst affected banks. This state of affairs was the result not so much of deregulation as of comparatively decentralized regulation and political pressures (from populist elements in both major parties, as well as lobbyists for the banks) to promote home ownership. By comparison with Canada’s, the US banking system was in many ways ‘fragile by design’.49

然而,在危机爆发前夕,美国绝非银行体系最脆弱的国家。英国大型银行的情况更糟——而且,就其所在经济体而言,它们的规模远超美国同行。据危机前的一项估计,英国四大银行的资产负债表总额约占该国GDP的440%。在美国,杠杆率高的是投资银行;在英国,则是商业银行。2008年10月10日星期五,英国险些爆发灾难性的银行挤兑,储户开始担心没有一家大型银行是安全的。欧洲大陆也存在类似的问题。德国州立银行(Landesbanken)早在2008年2月就已获得救助。10月底,据报道,德意志银行的资产超过其有形权益55倍以上。瑞士巨头瑞银集团(UBS)的状况也好不到哪里去。尽管当时很少有人注意到,但整体财务状况事实上,欧洲的情况比美国更糟,因此,尽管危机显然起源于美国,但其最严重的后果最终却波及到其他地方。当美国和欧盟都拒绝向冰岛提供援助时,那些拥有庞大银行的相对较小的国家的脆弱性暴露无遗。冰岛中央银行向美联储和英格兰银行提出的互换额度请求遭到拒绝,只能眼睁睁地看着英国政府关闭了两家冰岛人拥有的银行——Heritable银行和KSF银行,然后又根据《反恐法》冻结了Landsbanki银行的所有资产。冰岛所有银行以惊人的速度倒闭——冰岛经济也随之崩溃。51

Yet the United States was by no means the country with the most fragile banks on the eve of the crisis. The big British banks were even worse – and, in relation to the economy they were domiciled in, they were of far greater size than their US counterparts. According to one pre-crisis estimate, the total balance sheets of Britain’s four biggest banks amounted to around 440 per cent of the country’s GDP. In the United States it was the investment banks that were highly leveraged; in the United Kingdom it was the commercial banks. On Friday, 10 October 2008, the UK came within a whisker of a catastrophic bank run as depositors began to fear that none of the big banks was safe. Similar problems existed on the European continent. The German Landesbanken had already been bailed out in February 2008. At the end of October, it was reported that Deutsche Bank’s assets exceeded its tangible equity by a factor of more than 55.50 The Swiss giant UBS was not in much better shape. Though few people noticed at that time, the overall financial situation of Europe was in fact worse than that of the United States, so that – although the crisis very clearly originated in America – its worst effects would ultimately be felt elsewhere. The vulnerability of relatively small countries with very large banks was laid bare when both the United States and the European Union declined to provide assistance to Iceland. Its request for a swap line denied by the Fed and the Bank of England, the Icelandic central bank could only watch helplessly as the British government closed down two banks owned by Icelanders, Heritable and KSF, and then froze all assets of Landsbanki under an Anti-Terrorism Act. With appalling speed, all the Icelandic banks collapsed – and with them the country’s economy.51


所以,银行的确难辞其咎,但救助它们几乎肯定是正确的做法。更公正的结果应该惩罚所有股东,而不仅仅是雷曼兄弟;也应该让债券持有人蒙受损失;应该禁止发放用政府资金支付的奖金和股息。但这很可能在经济上造成更糟糕的后果。

So the banks were indeed to blame and yet rescuing them was almost certainly the right thing to do. A more just outcome would have punished all the equity holders, and not just Lehman’s; would have inflicted haircuts on the bondholders, too; would have prohibited the bonuses and dividends that were funded with government money. But that might well have been an economically worse outcome.

然而,仅仅从银行的角度解释这场危机是不完整的。银行资产负债表相对于其资本规模过大是危机的必要条件,但并非充分条件;如果这足以导致危机,那么将不良资产救助计划(TARP)从资产购买计划转变为直接向美国最大的银行注资就应该足以结束危机。但实际上,正如我们所见,银行已经通过证券化剥离了大部分不良贷款。正如高盛首席执行官布兰克费恩所观察到的,“2008年1月,全球只有12家AAA级公司。与此同时,却有64000种AAA级结构性融资工具,例如担保债务凭证。” 52 证券化催生了全球最具毒性的金融资产——法布里斯·图尔只是制造这些资产的众多金融工程师之一——并且这些资产的扩散范围远远超出了最初的发行国。银行业;值得注意的是,2008 年证券化几乎完全崩溃是这场危机的一个关键特征。

Nevertheless, an explanation of the crisis that focused solely on the banks would be incomplete. The excessive size of their balance sheets relative to their capital was a necessary but not sufficient cause of the crisis; if it had been sufficient, the transformation of TARP from an asset purchasing program into direct injections of capital into the biggest US banks should have sufficed to end the crisis. In reality, as we have seen, the banks had offloaded most of their bad loans through securitization. ‘In January 2008,’ as Goldman Sachs CEO Blankfein observed, ‘there were 12 triple A-rated companies in the world. At the same time, there were 64,000 structured finance instruments, such as collateralized debt obligations, rated triple A.’52 Securitization had produced the most toxic financial assets in the world – Fabrice Tourre was just one of an army of financial engineers manufacturing them – and had spread them far beyond the originating banks; revealingly, the near-total collapse of securitization in the course of 2008 was a key feature of the crisis.

货币政策也发挥了作用。危机的直接原因是美联储提高联邦基金利率,而由于可调利率抵押贷款的利率需要重新调整(通常是在较长的“诱导期”之后),这一举措对抵押贷款、住房和担保债务凭证(CDO)市场产生了滞后性的影响。美联储似乎并非有意为之,但却先是导致房价飙升——2004年房地产年通胀率接近20%——然后又导致房价以相同幅度的相反幅度下跌。美联储的政策偏离了约翰·泰勒提出的建议。 53群体思维使得央行的学术顾问们不敢质疑“资产价格通胀与美联储无关”这一信条。 54此外,美国抵押贷款市场在2003年前后发生的巨大结构性变化也很大程度上被忽视了。在此之前,大多数抵押贷款都是标准化的,由房利美和房地美这两家旨在促进住房所有权的政府支持企业(GSE)持有。但在危机爆发前的几年里,次级抵押贷款和其他“非标准”抵押贷款激增,这些贷款由像Countrywide这样激进的新兴机构发放,并被私下证券化。55衍生品的爆炸式增长进一步加剧了金融体系的复杂性,造成了大量不透明的或有债权和负债,尤其是像AIG这样的公司大量出售的信用违约互换。 56最后,如果没有数十亿美元的“供应商融资”从中国流向美国,美联储的任务肯定会轻松得多。57仅举一例说明中美关系是如何演变的:到2008年,中国已成为政府支持企业(GSE)“机构债券”的最大外国投资者,持有量超过5000亿美元。 58

Monetary policy, too, had played its part. The proximate cause of the crisis was the Federal Reserve’s increase of its federal funds rate, which struck the mortgage, housing and CDO markets with a lag as the rates on adjustable rate mortgages were reset (often after extended ‘teaser’ periods). Without apparently intending to, the Fed had first caused housing prices to surge – the annual rate of real estate inflation approached 20 per cent in 2004 – and then to slump by an equal and opposite amount. The Fed had drifted far from the policy rule recommended by John Taylor.53 Groupthink had discouraged the central bank’s academic advisers from questioning the doctrine that asset price inflation was none of the Fed’s business.54 Also largely overlooked was the huge structural change that had occurred in the US mortgage market after around 2003. Prior to that time, most mortgages were standardized and were held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the so-called government-sponsored entities (GSEs) set up to promote home ownership. But in the pre-crisis years there was a surge of subprime and other ‘nonconforming’ mortgage loans, originated by aggressive newcomers such as Countrywide and securitized privately.55 The explosive growth of derivatives further increased the complexity of the financial system by creating an opaque mass of contingent claims and liabilities, particularly the credit default swaps that had been sold in such quantities by companies such as AIG.56 Finally, without the billions of dollars of ‘vendor finance’ flowing from China to America, the Fed’s task would surely have been easier.57 To give just one example of how Chimerica had evolved, by 2008 China was by far the biggest foreign investor in GSE ‘agency bonds’, with holdings in excess of $500 billion.58

房地产市场的剧烈波动并非只影响高杠杆银行。高杠杆家庭也面临着同样的困境,他们的房屋价值跌破了抵押贷款的金额,导致房屋净值低于贷款额。当这些负资产房主因失业而被迫取消抵押品赎回权时,他们的经济状况也随之恶化。附近房屋的估值下降,降低了其他家庭的房屋净值。59这个问题绝不仅限于贫困家庭。 60从“杠杆损失”的角度来看,这比银行破产更为重要,因为由此导致的家庭净资产下降会造成相应的消费下降:净财富的相对损失越大,消费下降的幅度就越大。消费下降是2008年第三季度和第四季度GDP负增长的最大因素。与此同时,住宅和非住宅投资均有所下降,加剧了危机。这就是为什么美联储和财政部为稳定银行体系所做的努力未能阻止整体经济萎缩的原因。大约2%的TARP资金用于房主救济计划,而四分之三用于拯救金融机构。当时一些经济学家注意到了这种不对称性。事实上,马丁·费尔德斯坦敦促财政部长保尔森将政府的救助重点从银行转向抵押贷款家庭。 61即使银行在2009年恢复了放贷意愿,由于消费下降,企业也不愿借贷。 62 从波罗的海国家到冰岛,从西班牙到南非,凡是经历过房地产繁荣后紧接着萧条的地区,都出现了大致类似的事件序列。

It was not merely highly leveraged banks that were affected by the real estate roller coaster. Highly leveraged households found themselves underwater as the value of their homes fell below the amount of their mortgages. When homeowners with negative equity were driven into foreclosure by job losses, they depressed the valuations of nearby homes, reducing the home equity of other households.59 The problem was by no means confined to poorer households.60 In the ‘levered-losses’ view of the crisis, this mattered more than bank insolvency because the resulting declines in households’ net worth led to commensurate declines in consumption: the bigger the relative losses in net wealth, the bigger the declines in consumption. It was the fall in consumption that was the largest contributor to negative GDP growth in the third and fourth quarters of 2008. At the same time, residential and non-residential investment declined, deepening the crisis. This was why the efforts of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury to stabilize the banking system did not halt the overall economic contraction. Around 2 per cent of TARP funds were spent on homeowner relief programs, while three quarters went to the rescue of financial institutions. A few economists at the time noted this asymmetry. Indeed, Martin Feldstein urged Treasury Secretary Paulson to redirect the government’s relief efforts away from the banks to the mortgaged households.61 Even if banks recovered their readiness to lend in the course of 2009, businesses did not want to borrow because of declining consumption.62 Roughly similar sequences of events played out locally wherever there had been housing booms followed by busts, from the Baltic states to Iceland, from Spain to South Africa.

因此,信贷紧缩引发了全球金融危机和大衰退——一段产出萎缩的时期。那么,为什么这次衰退没有像1929年股市崩盘引发的银行倒闭和债务通缩那样演变成大萧条呢?克鲁格曼在2010年6月写道:“我担心,我们现在正处于第三次大萧条的初期阶段。对世界经济以及……数百万因失业而生活困顿的人们来说,代价将是……巨大的。”但他预见的“第三次大萧条”并未出现,尽管他不断哀叹“政策的失败”。 63大衰退的持续时间确实超过了战后任何一次衰退,长期失业率也创下了战后新高。但无论如何,这与20世纪30年代的黑暗时期都截然不同。1929年至1933年间,美国国内生产总值(GDP)年均下降14%,而大衰退最严重的季度——2008年最后一个季度——GDP仅比2007年同期下降8.2%。与大萧条时期不同,美国经济官方记录的衰退期仅为18个月(从2007年12月到2009年6月),仅略长于1973-1975年和1981-1982年的两次衰退,这两次衰退的持续时间均为16个月。20世纪30年代初,年通货紧缩率曾低至-8%,而消费者价格指数(CPI)仅在2008年(以及2014年末的短暂时期)出现下降。2009年7月至12月期间,物价水平从峰值到谷底的降幅不到4%。大萧条时期,失业率峰值约为劳动力的25%。 2009 年 10 月的峰值为 10%,低于 1982 年的最高水平。

The credit crunch thus led to a global financial crisis and also a great recession – a period of contracting output. Why, then, did the recession not become a depression, as had happened after the cascade of banking failure and debt deflation set in motion by the 1929 stock market crash? ‘We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression,’ wrote Krugman in June 2010. ‘The cost – to the world economy and . . . to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs – will . . . be immense.’ But the ‘third depression’ he foresaw did not materialize, despite his constant lamentations about ‘failure[s] of policy’.63 The great recession certainly lasted longer than any post-war recession, and the rate of long-term unemployment also set a post-war record. But by no stretch of the imagination did this resemble the dark days of the 1930s. Gross domestic product had declined at an average annual rate of 14 per cent between 1929 and 1933, whereas the worst quarter of the great recession – the last quarter of 2008 – saw GDP decline by just 8.2 per cent relative to the same period in 2007. Unlike in the Depression, the US economy was officially in recession for just eighteen months (from December 2007 until June 2009) – only slightly longer than the recessions of 1973–75 and 1981–82, each of which had lasted sixteen months. The annual rate of deflation fell as low as –8 per cent in the early 1930s, whereas only in 2008 (and briefly in late 2014) did the consumer price index fall. The decline in the price level from peak to trough between July and December 2009 was less than 4 per cent. Unemployment peaked at around 25 per cent of the labour force in the Depression. The peak in October 2009 was 10 per cent, lower than the highest rate in 1982.

2009年春季,房地产市场触底反弹。消费者信心也于此时开始复苏。经济史学家们一直在寻找新一轮经济衰退的迹象,他们欣慰地发现,在经历了世界贸易、全球工业产出和全球股市这三大主要指标似乎重蹈1929年后颓势的一年后,这三大指标在2009年全年均出现复苏。64美国股票在1929年8月达到峰值后,持续下跌了近三年。标普500指数在2007年10月至2009年间暴跌超过50%后,一路反弹,几乎没有遇到什么挫折,到2013年3月,该指数已恢复到危机前的水平。到2018年1月底,美国股市已达到比危机前峰值高出80%的水平。

Housing bottomed in spring 2009. Consumer confidence also began to recover at that time. Economic historians looking for signs of a new depression noted with relief that, after a year when major indicators – world trade, global industrial output, global stock markets – had seemed to replicate their post-1929 swoon, there was a recovery in all three indices in the course of 2009.64 US stocks had continued their downward slide for nearly three years after their peak in August 1929. After plunging by more than 50 per cent between October 2007 and 2009, the S&P 500 rallied with few setbacks until, by March 2013, it had regained its pre-crisis level. By the end of January 2018, US stocks had reached a level 80 per cent above the pre-crisis peak.

简而言之,历史并未重演:危机得到了控制。事实上,对于那些意志坚定、资金充裕的投资者而言,2009 年春季是千载难逢的良机。即使是那些投资组合中股票占比 60%、债券占比 40% 的普通美国投资者,也只经历了一个糟糕的年份:2008 年,当时股票下跌 37%,而债券 20% 的收益却未能弥补损失。2009 年和 2013 年债券的损失则被股票两位数的收益完全弥补。诚然,其他主要股市的表现都乏善可陈。以美元计算,损失确实非常巨大,但以当地货币计算,到2013年年中,英国和德国投资者的损失都已得到弥补。只有在欧洲边缘地区——尤其是希腊——金融危机的经济后果才可以被恰当地称为萧条。简而言之,就全球而言,这至多是一场轻微萧条。

In short, history did not repeat itself: the crisis was contained. Indeed, for investors with strong nerves and ample liquidity, the spring of 2009 was the opportunity of a lifetime. Even plain-vanilla American investors, who plodded along with 60 per cent of their portfolios in stocks and 40 per cent in bonds, suffered just one bad year: 2008, when a 37 per cent loss on stocks was not offset by a 20 per cent return on bonds. Losses on bonds in 2009 and 2013 were more than compensated for by double-digit gains on stocks. True, few other major stock markets performed quite so spectacularly in dollar terms, but in local-currency terms both British and German investors had been made whole by mid-2013. It was only in peripheral Europe – and especially in Greece – that the economic consequences of the financial crisis could credibly be called a depression. For the world as a whole, in short, this was at most a Slight Depression.

补救措施

Remedies

为什么金融危机没有演变成另一场大萧条?65大多数经济学家会从货币和财政政策的角度来回答这个问题,尤其是在美国。然而,要给出完整的答案,还需要考虑国际合作(特别是但不限于中央银行之间的合作)以及中国(即使中国仅仅是在追求自身国家利益)所发挥的作用。某些人对约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯理论的热情复兴,导致他们低估了这些国际因素。

Why did the financial crisis not become another Great Depression?65 Most economists would answer that question by talking mostly about monetary and fiscal policy, particularly in the United States. Yet a complete answer would also need to consider the roles played by international cooperation (especially but not only between central banks) and especially by China (even when it was simply pursuing its own national interest). The enthusiastic revival of the teachings of John Maynard Keynes in some quarters led to an underestimation of these international factors.

事实上,凯恩斯对政策的影响远不及米尔顿·弗里德曼。弗里德曼1963年出版的《美国货币史》(与安娜·施瓦茨合著)曾让一代货币经济学家明白在金融危机中应该避免哪些错误做法。伯南克及其同事不仅将联邦基金利率降至接近零的水平,还大规模购买了各种金融资产,远远超出了弗里德曼和施瓦茨隐含建议的传统公开市场操作。这些购买行动的资金来源是创造超额准备金,而非传统货币,这些资金实际上流入了商业银行并留在那里赚取利息。结果,早在2008年12月10日,美联储的资产负债表规模就超过了2.2万亿美元,比上一年增长了近1.4万亿美元。美联储的资产不仅包括传统的国债,还包括4480亿美元的“定期拍卖信贷”、3120亿美元的商业票据,以及……另有 2330 亿美元的“其他贷款”。此外,其资产负债表外还有 2000 亿美元的定期资产支持证券贷款机制 (TALF),旨在支撑此类证券市场。

Keynes was in fact a much less important influence on policy than Milton Friedman, whose 1963 Monetary History of the United States (co-authored by Anna Schwartz) had taught a generation of monetary economists what not to do in a financial crisis. Bernanke and his colleagues not only cut the federal funds rate to near-zero; they also engaged in large-scale purchases of all kinds of financial assets, reaching far beyond the conventional open-market operations implicitly recommended by Friedman and Schwartz. These purchases were funded by the creation of excess reserves, not conventional currency, which essentially went to commercial banks and stayed there, accruing interest. As a result, as early as 10 December 2008, the Fed’s balance sheet exceeded $2.2 trillion, a leap of nearly $1.4 trillion over the previous year. The central bank’s assets now included not only traditional Treasury securities, but also $448 billion in ‘term auction credit’, $312 billion in commercial paper, and $233 billion in ‘other loans’. Off its balance sheet was an additional $200 billion Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF), designed to prop up the market for such securities.

那是一个充斥着各种缩略语的时代。除了不良资产救助计划(TARP)和定期资产救助基金(TALF)之外,零利率政策(ZIRP)和量化宽松政策(QE)的组合——以及前瞻性指引(保证此类政策将“持续一段时间”或“延长一段时间”)* ——足以避免银行倒闭的连锁反应:根据联邦存款保险公司的数据,2008年1月至2010年1月期间,共有183家美国银行倒闭。然而,美联储的政策目标远不止于防止重蹈20世纪30年代初那场破坏性极强的美国银行业危机。在一段时间内,美联储的角色从最后贷款人转变为最后资产管理人。随后,在最初的危机过后,美联储领导层选择维持并进一步扩大美联储的资产负债表规模,其规模先是翻了一番,然后翻了两番,最终翻了三番。在第二轮量化宽松政策(2010年11月)期间,美联储在八个月内购买了6000亿美元的美国国债。在扭转操作(2011年9月)中,美联储延长了其债券组合的到期日,这一操作在2012年6月再次实施。三个月后,美联储宣布将每月从房利美等政府支持(现已国有化)机构购买400亿美元的抵押贷款支持证券(第三轮量化宽松政策),并从2012年12月起每月额外购买450亿美元的美国国债。所有这些措施的持续时间远远超出了2008年或2009年任何人的预期——实际上,它甚至超过了伯南克担任美联储主席的两届任期,直到2014年2月他卸任,由珍妮特·耶伦接任。零利率政策的结束日期也一再推迟。起初,这只是一个短期权宜之计。起初,这项计划的期限是“至少到2015年中期”,但到了2012年底,该计划的期限变成了失业率降至6.5%以下。(直到 2014 年 4 月才实现)。这是美联储当年设定的两个目标之一:1 月份,美联储还设定了 2% 的“长期目标”通胀率,这是对这一目标的迟来采纳。

It was a time of acronyms. In addition to TARP and TALF, the combination of a zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) and quantitative easing (QE) – along with forward guidance (assurances that such policies would be continued ‘for some time’ or ‘for an extended period’)* – sufficed to avert a chain reaction of bank failures: in all, 183 US banks failed between January 2008 and January 2010, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. However, Fed policy aimed at much more than the prevention of a US banking crisis of the sort that had been so damaging in the early 1930s. For a time, the bank went from being the lender of last resort to being the asset manager of last resort. Then, after the initial crisis had been overcome, the Fed leadership opted to maintain and then further grow the System’s balance sheet, which first doubled, then trebled, and ultimately quadrupled in size. Under QE2 (November 2010), the Fed bought $600 billion of US Treasuries over eight months. In Operation Twist (September 2011), the Fed extended the maturity of its bond portfolio, an exercise repeated in June 2012. Three months later, the Fed announced that it would make monthly purchases of $40 billion of mortgage-backed securities from the government-sponsored (now government-owned) agencies such as Fannie Mae (QE3), to which was added $45 billion of Treasury securities a month from December 2012. All of this lasted much longer than anyone had anticipated in 2008 or 2009 – indeed it extended beyond Bernanke’s two terms as Fed chair, which ended in February 2014, when he was succeeded by Janet Yellen. The end-date for ZIRP was regularly postponed. At first it was a short-term expedient. For a time, it was ‘at least through mid-2015’, but at the end of 2012 it became contingent on the unemployment rate’s falling below 6.5 per cent (which it did not do until April 2014). This was one of two targets the Fed set itself that year: in January it had also set a ‘longer run goal’ of 2 per cent inflation, a belated adoption of such a target.

这些史无前例的政策旨在实现什么目标?尽管部分灵感来源于日本央行在20世纪90年代的经验,但美国实际上成为了伯南克检验其关于如何实现可持续宏观经济复苏理论的试验场。与其他一些央行的同行不同,这位前普林斯顿大学教授对政策对汇率的影响并不感兴趣。他关注的是“投资组合渠道”,这意味着政策的目标是通过美联储购买债券来压低政府债券收益率,从而促使投资者转向公司债券,进而降低企业借贷成本并刺激商业活动。然而,伯南克本人对量化宽松政策的玩笑——“它在实践中有效,但在理论上无效”——并非毫无道理。许多关于量化宽松的论文并没有最终证实他的方法;似乎更合理的解释是,真正的投资组合渠道是由美联储购买债券引发的,进而导致其他资产价格(例如股票和房地产)的快速上涨。多项研究发现,1万亿美元的资产购买计划使长期债券收益率下降了0.25%至1.5%,但在美国公司债券收益率方面,其预期效果却难以显现。AAA级和CCC级公司债券的收益率均明显下降,但仍处于历史区间,且与整体经济复苏的走势密切相关。 66 此外,约翰·科克伦等人还提出了一个令人尴尬的反事实假设:即使没有量化宽松政策,债券收益率也可能下降。 67或许,这场危机只是利率长期下降进程中一个动荡的插曲。 68或许,在平息恐慌之后,美联储工作人员应该就此关门歇业,并在门上留下一张纸条,上面写着:“利率为零,我们将休假,直到再次加息为止。失业率回升至5%时再联系我们。” 69

What were these unprecedented policies intended to achieve? Although they were inspired partly by the Bank of Japan’s experience in the 1990s, the United States was in fact an experimental laboratory for testing Bernanke’s own theories about how to achieve a sustained macroeconomic recovery. Unlike his counterparts in some other central banks, the former Princeton professor was uninterested in the effects of policy on exchange rates. His focus was on the ‘portfolio channel’, meaning that the goal of policy was to use downward pressure on government bond yields (through Fed purchases) to push investors to shift to corporate bonds, which would in turn lower the cost of corporate borrowing and stimulate business activity. Yet Bernanke’s own joke about QE – that it worked in practice but not in theory – was not without some truth. The many papers on the subject did not conclusively vindicate his approach; it seemed more plausible that the real portfolio channel led from Fed bond purchases to rapid appreciation of other asset prices (such as stocks and real estate). A number of studies found that $1 trillion in asset purchases reduced long-term bond yields by between 0.25 and 1.5 per cent, but it was harder to see the intended effect in US corporate yields. Corporate yields for both AAA and CCC debt clearly fell, but they remained within their historic ranges and tracked the overall economic recovery quite closely.66 There was also the awkward counterfactual (raised by John Cochrane and others) that bond yields might have fallen anyway, even without QE.67 Perhaps the crisis was just a turbulent sub-plot in a long-running saga of falling interest rates.68 Perhaps, having stemmed the panic, the Fed staff should just have shut up shop, leaving a note on the door saying: ‘Interest rates are zero, and we’ll be on vacation until it’s time to raise them again. Call us when the unemployment rate is back to 5 per cent.’69

量化宽松政策确实起作用的最佳证据就是后来发生的事情。2013年5月,伯南克本人曾表示,美联储债券购买规模缩减可能在联邦公开市场委员会(FOMC)“未来几次会议”中实施。随后引发的“缩减恐慌”导致十年期美国国债收益率从略高于1.6%飙升至2.6%以上,其影响远远超出美国经济。2014年秋季金融市场波动性再次加剧,促使圣路易斯联储主席詹姆斯·布拉德表示,缩减量化宽松规模的决定现在“取决于数据”,如果通胀预期下降,甚至可能需要“更多量化宽松”。

The best evidence that QE did matter was what happened when, in May 2013, Bernanke himself stated that a tapering of Fed bond purchases could take place ‘in the next few meetings’ of the FOMC. The ensuing ‘taper tantrum’ saw ten-year Treasury yields jump from just over 1.6 per cent to above 2.6 per cent, with ramifications that extended far beyond the US economy. Another surge in financial volatility in the autumn of 2014 led James Bullard, president of the St. Louis Fed, to state that decisions on tapering QE were now ‘data dependent’ and that ‘more QE’ might even be needed if inflation expectations were to decline.

因此,货币政策与避免再次发生大萧条无关的可能性似乎不大。然而,零利率政策、量化宽松、前瞻性指引和通胀目标制并不能充分解释美国经济复苏的原因。除非有人认为经济复苏无论如何都会发生,政策毫无作用,否则财政政策必然也发挥了一定作用。美国财政部投入资金实施了各种旨在应对危机的项目,包括与美联储联合运营的公私合营投资基金(该基金从银行购买流动性较差的资产);向银行直接注资(即第二代不良资产救助计划);以及“房主负担能力和稳定计划”(HASP),该计划投入2750亿美元用于降低陷入困境的房主的利息支出。到2008年底,联邦机构已为应对危机拨付了超过2万亿美元。70但财政政策的核心——当然也是最凯恩斯主义的措施——是 2009 年的《美国复苏与再投资法案》(ARRA),该法案结合了减税和支出项目,预计两年内将耗资 8250 亿美元,约占预计 GDP 的 5.8%。

It seems unlikely, then, that monetary policy was irrelevant to the avoidance of another Great Depression. However, ZIRP, QE, forward guidance and inflation targeting cannot be regarded as adequate explanations of the US recovery. Unless one believes that the recovery would have happened anyway and policy had no effect, some role must also have been played by fiscal policy. The US Treasury spent money on a variety of different programs designed to counter the crisis, including a Public-Private Investment Fund, jointly run with the Federal Reserve, which bought up illiquid assets from banks; direct capital injections into banks (TARP in its second iteration); and the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan (HASP), which deployed $275 billion to reduce interest payments for struggling homeowners. Already by the end of 2008 federal agencies had disbursed more than $2 trillion in response to the crisis.70 But the centrepiece of fiscal policy – and certainly the most Keynesian measure – was the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), a combination of tax cuts and spending projects that was expected to cost $825 billion over two years, or around 5.8 per cent of projected GDP.

奥巴马总统执政第一年的财政政策可谓大胆。预计财政部将在该财年发行约2.2万亿美元的债券。除了“住房援助计划”(HASP)和“美国复苏与再投资法案”(ARRA)之外,这笔资金还将用于弥补约5000亿美元的周期性收入缺口,以及9000亿美元用于购买资产和弥补资产损失。人们很容易对这项政策提出批评。为了避免使用缩写,这项政策被称为“刺激计划”。批评人士计算得出,创造一个就业岗位大约需要22.3万美元,而且“随时可开工”的项目匮乏,意味着公路改善或学校建设等方面的支出进展缓慢。众议院还增加了一系列宏观经济价值存疑的“分肥”措施。 71与以往使用财政刺激政策的时期不同,美国当时是一个相对开放的经济体;由于这一原因以及其他一些原因,刺激计划的乘数效应可能很低——或许更接近于零而非一——因此,8250亿美元的支出不会转化为等额(更不用说更大)的总产出增长。 72

Fiscal policy in the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency was bold. In all, the Treasury was projected to issue around $2.2 trillion in debt over the fiscal year. In addition to HASP and ARRA, this would fund around $500 billion in cyclical revenue shortfalls and $900 billion in making asset purchases and covering asset losses. It was not difficult to find fault with what became known (to avoid the acronyms) as ‘the stimulus’. Critics calculated that it would cost around $223,000 to create a single job and that a paucity of ‘shovel-ready’ projects meant that spending on highway improvements or school construction would happen too slowly. The House of Representatives had added a variety of pork-barrel measures of questionable macroeconomic value.71 Unlike in previous eras when fiscal stimulus had been used, the United States was a relatively open economy; for this and other reasons, the multiplier was likely to be low – perhaps closer to zero than one – so that $825 billion of spending would not translate into an equivalent (much less a larger) addition to total output.72

对凯恩斯主义方法的最佳辩护是,随着私人借贷的崩溃,政府借贷必须增加,以抵消总需求的冲击。73问题在于,现有的公共债务存量(2008年公众持有的联邦债务占GDP的39%)意味着,即使其他国家——尤其是英国——受到的限制更大,政府能做的也有限。当时,国会预算办公室预测,债务将在2010-11年达到GDP的54%的峰值,但这一预测的前提是2011-12年的经济增长率将超过4%。事实上,债务在2012年超过了GDP的70%,并在奥巴马任期结束时达到77%,几乎是他当选时的两倍。第二个障碍是政治性的。共和党人反对奥巴马的众多形式之一,便是其财政鹰派立场。这种立场在某些情况下是真诚的,但在大多数情况下则出于政治投机。由于国会(2010年后由共和党控制下议院)和白宫未能就一项两党财政改革方案达成一致,导致2013年全面削减开支,并被冠以“自动减支”之名。财政赤字从2009年接近GDP 10%的峰值降至2012年的6.8%,并在2016年进一步降至3.2%。坚定的凯恩斯主义者认为,规模更大、持续时间更长的财政刺激措施能够实现更快的经济增长,但这种反事实假设并未得到证实。以日本的经验来看,1991 年后的二十年间,巨额赤字平均约为 6%,导致公共净债务占 GDP 的比例增长了约十倍,但实际产出仅略有增长(18%)。

The best defence of the Keynesian approach was that, with private borrowing collapsing, government borrowing had to increase in order to offset that blow to aggregate demand.73 The problem was that the existing stock of public debt (the share of federal debt held by the public in 2008 was 39 per cent of GDP) meant that there were limits to what could be done, even if other countries – notably the United Kingdom – were more constrained. At the time, the Congressional Budget Office forecast that the debt would peak at 54 per cent of GDP in 2010–11, but that assumed that growth by 2011–12 would be above 4 per cent. In fact, the debt rose above 70 per cent in 2012 and reached 77 per cent at the end of Obama’s term, nearly double its level at the time of his election. A second obstacle was political. One of the myriad forms of Republican opposition to Obama was a fiscal hawkishness that was sincere in some cases but politically opportunistic in most. The failure of Congress (the lower chamber of which was controlled by the Republicans after 2010) and the White House to agree on a bipartisan program of fiscal reform meant that across-the-board spending cuts were imposed in 2013 under the heading ‘sequestration’. The deficit fell from its peak in 2009 of just under 10 per cent of GDP to 6.8 per cent in 2012 and 3.2 per cent in 2016. Ardent Keynesians argued that a much larger and sustained fiscal stimulus would have achieved more rapid growth, but that counterfactual was not supported by the experience of Japan, where large deficits, averaging roughly 6 per cent over a period of twenty years after 1991, had led to a roughly ten-fold increase in net public debt as a share of GDP but only a modest increase (18 per cent) in real output.

关键在于货币政策和财政政策的融合:财政部发行新债券(长期债务)来弥补赤字的同时,美联储越来越多地成为主要买家,用计息储备金(一种短期债务)支付。“大规模资产购买”(量化宽松的另一种说法)意味着政府的一部分在创造长期债务,另一部分则在创造短期债务来购买这些长期债务。由于资产购买是通过创造计息超额储备金来融资的,因此不存在通胀风险。但刺激效果也并不显著。或许美联储试图让金融市场相信它正在神奇地降低长期利率。但也或许,支付储备金利息反而抑制了银行的放贷意愿。

The critical point was that monetary and fiscal policy became fused: as the Treasury sold new bonds (long-term debt) to finance its deficits, increasingly the Federal Reserve was the lead buyer, paying with interest-bearing reserves, a form of short-term debt. ‘Large-scale asset purchases’ – another term for QE – meant that one part of the government was creating long-term debt, and another part was creating short-term debt to buy it. The fact that the asset purchases were financed by the creation of interest-bearing excess reserves meant that there was no inflation risk. But there was also not much stimulus either. Perhaps the Fed was persuading the financial markets that it was magically lowering long-term rates. But perhaps the payment of interest on reserves was discouraging banks from lending.


美国经济学家从弗里德曼和凯恩斯那里汲取的经验教训本身并不足以解释世界是如何避免经济大萧条的。因为美国的政策需要放在更广阔的背景下看待。第三个变量,或许同样重要,是危机第一阶段的国际合作。美联储发挥了领导作用,但它并非孤军奋战。例如,2009年10月8日,美联储、欧洲中央银行、英格兰银行、加拿大银行、瑞士国家银行、瑞典央行和中国人民银行同时宣布降息。美联储与其他14家央行之间的互换协议在遏制2008-2009年的恐慌中发挥了至关重要的作用。 74在这些安排下,美联储的未偿信贷额度峰值达到5800亿美元。 75需要这样的互换额度令人惊讶。在2008年之前,大多数担忧金融危机的经济学家倾向于认为美元会贬值。多年来,纽约大学的努里尔·鲁比尼(Nouriel Roubini)——他后来名声大噪——一直认为美元会贬值。正如“末日博士”所预言的那样,这将是美国经常账户赤字的最终后果。然而,实际发生的危机并非他所预言的那样。在全球银行和影子银行挤兑浪潮中,世界各国纷纷涌入美元和以美元计价的安全资产,推高了美元对几乎所有其他货币的汇率。美联储悄然无声地提供了所需的美元,避免了美元兑英镑和美元兑欧元汇率出现更大的波动,并未引起美国政界人士的注意。7620世纪30年代国际经济合作彻底崩溃的局面相比,2008-2009年见证了全球治理的典范。77美国的有效领导下,避免了一场大规模的北大西洋银行危机(类似于1931年发生的那种危机)。78

The lessons American economists had learned from Friedman and Keynes do not suffice by themselves to explain how the world avoided a depression. For US policy needs to be seen in a wider context. A third variable, perhaps as important, was the international cooperation that characterized the first phase of the crisis. The Fed led; it did not act alone. On 8 October 2009, for example, cuts in interest rates were announced simultaneously by the Fed, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Canada, the Swiss National Bank, the Swedish Riksbank and the People’s Bank of China. Swap agreements between the Fed and fourteen other central banks played a crucial role in containing the panic of 2008–9.74 At peak, the Fed’s outstanding credit under these arrangements was $580 billion.75 That such swap lines were needed came as a surprise. Prior to 2008, most economists who worried about a financial crisis had tended to think there would be dollar depreciation. For years, Nouriel Roubini of New York University – who became famous as ‘Dr. Doom’ – had warned that this would be the ultimate consequence of the US current account deficit. The crisis that happened was not the one he had predicted, however. In the global run on banks and shadow banks, the world fled into dollars and dollar-denominated safe assets, driving up the dollar relative to nearly all other currencies. Quietly, without drawing the attention of American politicians, the Fed supplied the requisite dollars, thereby avoiding much larger moves in the dollar-sterling and dollar-euro exchange rates.76 By comparison with the events of the 1930s, which had seen a complete breakdown in international economic cooperation, the period 2008–9 witnessed model global governance.77 With effective American leadership, a massive North Atlantic banking crisis (of the sort that had happened in 1931) was avoided.78

然而,其他央行在多大程度上效仿美联储的做法存在显著差异。英国央行紧随其后:其资产负债表扩张规模创历史新高,从危机前夕占GDP的不到5%飙升至峰值时的近25%。日本央行的资产负债表规模原本就十分庞大,这得益于其早期对量化宽松政策的尝试:从2008年占GDP的不到15%跃升至2014年的50%。欧洲央行则是个例外。由于其资产负债表规模远小于欧元区GDP,因此它也是在量化宽松政策方面犹豫不决——正如我们将看到的,这造成了严重的后果。事实上,2011年7月,欧洲央行管理委员会将基准利率上调至4.25%——这一决定虽然一致通过,但却极其不明智。

There were, however, important differences in the extent to which other central banks followed the Fed’s lead. The Bank of England did not lag far behind: the expansion of its balance sheet was the largest in its entire history, from below 5 per cent of GDP on the eve of the crisis to nearly 25 per cent at peak. The Bank of Japan’s balance sheet was already large because of its early experiment with QE: from below 15 per cent of GDP in 2008, it leapt to 50 per cent in 2014. The European Central Bank was the exception to the rule. With a balance sheet far smaller in relation to Eurozone GDP, it was also the central bank that hesitated to go down the QE road – with important consequences, as we shall see. Indeed, in July 2011, the ECB’s Governing Council raised its benchmark interest rate to 4.25 per cent – a decision as unwise as it was unanimous.

西方评论员对中国人民银行资产负债表的扩张关注甚少——但这主要是因为他们总体上对中国在应对金融危机中所扮演的角色关注不足。事实上,这最终被证明至关重要。因为金融危机并非仅仅是北大西洋地区的事件,而是一场真正的全球性危机。尽管资金从中国流向美国的跨太平洋净流量总额较小,但其重要性远超新大西洋之间的资金流动。约克、伦敦和法兰克福。79毕竟,美国与其长期欧洲盟友之间的合作一直都很有可能。而中美两国——这两个在20世纪50年代曾交战,并在70年代之前关系疏远的国家——之间的合作则不能以同样的方式被视为理所当然。事实上,金融危机爆发之初,大多数评论员担心的情况恰恰相反。

Western commentators paid much less attention to the expansion of the balance sheet of the People’s Bank of China – but that was because they paid much less attention generally to China’s role in fighting the financial crisis. In fact, it was to prove vital. For the financial crisis was not a purely North Atlantic affair. It was authentically global, and the net flows of money across the Pacific from China to America were more important, even if their gross volume was less, than the flows between New York, London and Frankfurt.79 After all, cooperation between the United States and its long-standing European allies was always quite likely. Cooperation between China and America – countries that had been at war in the 1950s and estranged until the 1970s – could not be taken for granted in the same way. Indeed, when the financial crisis began, most commentators feared the opposite.


人们常常忘记,雷曼兄弟的倒闭发生在北京奥运会盛大开幕仅一个多月之后,即2008年8月8日,这场灾难性事件震惊了西方金融界。奥运会的开幕让许多西方观众第一次亲眼目睹了新中国雄心勃勃的景象。官方口号是“同一个世界,同一个梦想”,但国内的氛围却让持不同政见的刘晓波联想到民族主义的“热锅”。在危机的第一阶段——信贷紧缩——中国一度似乎有意出手援助华尔街,通过收购美国银行和资产管理公司的股权来实现这一目标。然而,随着美国金融危机的规模逐渐显现,北京感到恐慌。相反,中国政府准备推出一项规模达4万亿元人民币(约合5860亿美元)的国家刺激计划来应对危机,旨在提振内需,以抵消出口市场的急剧萎缩。与美国的刺激计划不同,中国的刺激计划主要(70%)由地方政府实施。此外,美国不同的是,中国的刺激计划是通过创造信贷来融资的。以损失的产出衡量,中国取得的成果远超西方世界。据对冲基金桥水基金估计,2008年下半年中国经济仅萎缩了1.5%;到2009年第三季度,经济已比危机前水平高出7%。未来总理李克强所关注的指标——铁路货运量和电力消耗——也呈现出类似的趋势,2008年有所下滑,但次年便反弹至危机前水平以上。

It is often forgotten that the failure of Lehman Brothers struck the Western financial world just over a month after the spectacular opening of the Beijing Olympics, on 8 August 2008, which gave many Western viewers their first frontal view of the new China’s vaulting ambition. The official slogan was ‘One World, One Dream’, but the local mood put the dissident Liu Xiaobo in mind of a ‘hot wok’ of nationalism. In the first phase of the crisis – the credit crunch – it briefly seemed as if China might step in to assist Wall Street by buying equity stakes in US banks and asset managers. However, as the scale of the American financial crisis became clear, Beijing took fright. Instead, the Chinese authorities prepared to defend themselves with a 4 trillion yuan ($586 billion) national stimulus program aimed at boosting domestic demand to offset the drastic contraction in export markets. Unlike the American stimulus, China’s was mostly (70 per cent) delivered by local government.80 Unlike in the United States, it was financed by credit creation. The results – measured in terms of forgone output – were far more impressive than anything achieved in the Western world. According to estimates by the hedge fund Bridgewater, China’s economy contracted by just 1.5 percent in the second half of 2008; by the third quarter of 2009 it was 7 per cent above its pre-crisis level. The indicators favoured by future premier Li Keqiang – railway cargo volumes and electricity consumption – showed a similar trend, dipping in 2008 but then rallying above pre-crisis levels the following year.

一度看来,这场危机似乎预示着中美帝国的终结。那些曾主张购买华尔街知名公司股份的人遭到了降职。大西洋两岸的气氛都发生了变化。新当选总统奥巴马提名的财政部长蒂姆·盖特纳指责中国“操纵汇率”。中国发言人反驳说,是美国在推行冒险的货币和财政政策。温家宝总理宣称:“中国是否继续购买(美国国债),以及购买多少,应该根据中国的需要,取决于外汇市场的安全和价值保障。”一位美国漫画家想象了一艘中国潜艇威胁美国军舰的画面:“掉头,否则我们就抛售所有国库券。”中国国家外汇管理局的这一举动无疑会给本已摇摇欲坠的体系雪上加霜。当时北京的气氛几乎和华盛顿一样紧张。

It seemed for a time as if the crisis spelt the end of Chimerica. Those who had advocated buying stakes in big-name Wall Street firms were demoted. On both sides of the Atlantic, the tone changed. Tim Geithner – nominated by the newly elected President Barack Obama to be his Treasury Secretary – accused China of ‘currency manipulation’. Chinese spokesmen shot back that it was the United States that was pursuing risky monetary and fiscal policies. ‘Whether China will continue to buy [US bonds], and how much to buy,’ declared Premier Wen Jiabao, ‘should be in accordance with China’s needs, and depend on the safety and protection of value of foreign exchange.’81 One American cartoonist imagined a Chinese submarine threatening a US warship: ‘Turn around or we sell all our T-bills.’ Such a move by the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange would have dealt a further blow to an already shaken system. The atmosphere in Beijing at that time was almost as fraught as the atmosphere in Washington.

但中美关系依然存在。因为在危机中,中国还有什么真正的选择呢?2009年2月11日,中国银监会主任罗平问道:“除了美国国债,你们还能持有什么?”

But Chimerica lived on. For what real choice did China have in the crisis? ‘Except for U.S. Treasuries, what can you hold?’ asked Luo Ping, director-general at the China Banking Regulatory Commission, on 11 February 2009:

黄金?你们不持有日本国债或英国国债。美国国债才是避险天堂。对包括中国在内的所有国家来说,这是唯一的选择。我们恨你们。一旦你们开始发行1万亿到2万亿美元的债券……我们知道美元肯定会贬值,所以我们恨你们,但我们也无能为力。82

Gold? You don’t hold Japanese government bonds or UK bonds. US Treasuries are the safe haven. For everyone, including China, it is the only option. We hate you guys. Once you start issuing $1 trillion – $2 trillion . . . we know the dollar is going to depreciate, so we hate you guys but there is nothing much we can do.82

九天后, 《人民日报》发表社论,甚至用“中美”一词来解释中国的困境。社论宣称:“中美已成为双边贸易的利益攸关方,命运与共,荣辱与共。总的来说,中美关系在走向正常化之前,将经历一段冷淡期。” 83事实上,2007年至2009年间,中国购买美国国债的规模增加了两倍,使其成为第三轮量化宽松政策(QE3)下仅次于美联储的第二大国债买家,从而促成了……危机后的世界利率异常低迷。在2011年和2012年有所下降之后,中国在2013年恢复了对美国国债的购买。2014年前五个月,中国增持美国国债的速度创下历史新高。

In an editorial published nine days later, the People’s Daily even used the word ‘Chimerica’ to explain China’s predicament. ‘China and U.S. have become stakeholders in terms of bilateral trade, a common destiny to share fortunes,’ the paper declared. ‘Generally speaking, China-U.S. relations will be following a period of chilliness before heading towards normalization.’83 In fact, China tripled its purchases of US Treasuries between 2007 and 2009, making it second only to the Fed as the biggest buyer of Treasury bonds under QE3, and thereby contributing to the exceptionally low interest rates that characterized the post-crisis world. After dipping in 2011 and 2012, Chinese purchases of US bonds resumed in 2013. In the first five months of 2014, China increased its holdings of Treasury debt at the fastest pace on record.

间接受益于中国危机应对政策的并非只有美国。据2014年估计,尽管中国GDP仅占全球GDP的12%左右,但在过去三年中,中国创造的信贷却占全球信贷总量的40%至50%。这种溢出效应——尤其是在大宗商品市场——几乎肯定为所有严重依赖原材料出口的新兴市场和发达市场提供了支撑。中国的刺激措施至少与美国的刺激措施同等重要,这似乎是合理的。从2008年第四季度到2017年第二季度,中国非金融部门的信贷占GDP的比重从不足150%飙升至约250%,这一增幅远超其他任何主要经济体。

It was not only the United States that benefited indirectly from China’s crisis-fighting policies. In 2014 it was estimated that, despite accounting for around 12 per cent of global GDP, China had accounted for between 40 and 50 per cent of global credit creation during the previous three years. The spillover effects – most importantly in commodity markets – almost certainly put a floor underneath all those emerging and developed markets that relied heavily on exports of raw materials. That China’s stimulus was at least as important as America’s seems plausible. Between the last quarter of 2008 and the second of 2017, China’s credit to the non-financial sector surged from below 150 per cent of GDP to around 250 per cent, a much bigger jump than was recorded in any other major economy.

中国的刺激措施与美国的截然不同。在美国,银行业信贷疲软,而中国的国有银行则积极响应政府指令放贷。美国的基建项目投资进展缓慢,而中国地方政府则以惊人的速度投入建设。成果随处可见,包括新建的高速公路、铁路、公寓楼和机场。然而,金融问题却在迅速累积,但却鲜为人知。危机前,中国的经济模式依赖于高水平的国内(主要是企业)储蓄和净出口增长。如今,这一模式则依赖于债务的快速积累、固定资产投资以及由电子商务快速扩张推动的家庭消费增长。此前,中国凭借更低的单位劳动力成本和更完善的基础设施,与其他新兴市场展开竞争。而现在,中国却成为大宗商品出口商的首选买家,这至关重要。这为澳大利亚矿石出口商、巴西大豆出口商和智利铜出口商提供了需求来源。简而言之,拯救世界的不仅仅是各国央行的资产负债表和财政赤字,还有中美关系。

The Chinese stimulus was profoundly different from the American. Whereas credit from the banking sector was weak in the United States, China’s state-controlled banks lent aggressively in response to the government’s command. Whereas investment in infrastructure projects proceeded at a glacial pace in America, China’s local governments set to work with astonishing alacrity. The results were visible all over the country in the form of new highways, new railways, new apartment blocks, new airports. Less visible were the financial problems that were rapidly accumulating. Prior to the crisis, China’s economic model had been based on high levels of domestic (principally corporate) savings and the growth of net exports. Now the model was based on rapidly accumulating debt, investment in fixed assets, as well as growing household consumption, propelled by the rapid expansion of e-commerce. Previously China had been a competitor to all other emerging markets, undercutting them thanks to its lower unit labour costs and superior infrastructure. Now it became the buyer of first resort for commodity exporters, a vital source of demand for Australian ore exporters, Brazilian soy exporters and Chilean copper exporters. In short, it was not only central bank balance sheets and fiscal deficits that ‘saved the world’. It was also Chimerica.


金融危机也带来了理论层面的挑战。对于各领域的专家而言,这场灾难本身以及应对措施都令人极其尴尬。“为什么没有人预见到它的到来?”伊丽莎白二世女王在2008年12月访问伦敦政治经济学院时问道。这是一个合理的问题。自2006年以来,少数特立独行的经济学家(其中也包括我)就曾警告说,一场重大危机可能即将袭击过度杠杆化的金融体系,但几乎没有经济学家认真对待这些警告。84那些曾宣称市场效率高的人发现自己陷入了与那些曾极力推崇金融创新益处的人类似的困境。 85 “但我们的模型并非旨在预测金融危机”这种说法遭到了公众的嘲讽。然而,完全有可能有人对危机的危险性判断正确,却对危机管理的危险性判断错误。作者是众多错误预测如此庞大的财政赤字会导致债券收益率上升的评论员之一。尤其错误的是我和其他人于2010年11月15日联名致伯南克的信,信中呼吁“重新考虑并停止”量化宽松政策,因为它“有可能导致货币贬值和通货膨胀”,而且无法实现“美联储促进就业的目标”,只会“扭曲金融市场”。 86经过更深入的研究和思考,人们才意识到央行资产负债表的扩张并不会导致通货膨胀。87这种误解十分普遍。2009年夏季对全球736家借贷和投资机构进行的一项调查显示,担忧通货膨胀和担忧通货紧缩的机构数量几乎持平。一个特别具有误导性的信号是2009年至2011年间大宗商品价格的飙升,而(正如我们所看到的)这在很大程度上是由于……受中国信贷繁荣的推动。另一个错误信号是2009年夏季美国长期利率的短暂上升。大约在同一时期,投资银行摩根士丹利预测,到2010年,美国十年期国债收益率将达到5.5%。(事实上,当年收益率跌破3%,2012年跌破2%。)我本人在2009年4月曾预测“我们的货币政策和财政政策之间将出现一场非常痛苦的拉锯战”,但这一预测是错误的,未能预见到量化宽松政策将如何解决潜在的冲突。但更优秀的经济学家也犯了类似的错误。事实上,国际货币基金组织自身也反映了当时普遍存在的担忧,即巨额赤字将导致利率上升。

The financial crisis had its intellectual aspect. For all kinds of experts, both the debacle itself and the remedies deployed in response to it were profoundly embarrassing. ‘Why did no one see it coming?’ asked Queen Elizabeth II on a visit to the London School of Economics in December 2008. It was a fair question. Scarcely any of the big names in economics had taken seriously the few eccentrics (myself among them) who had warned since 2006 that a major crisis might imminently strike an excessively leveraged financial system.84 Those who had proclaimed the efficiency of markets found themselves in similar difficulties to those who had extolled the benefits of financial innovation.85 The argument ‘But our models are not designed to predict financial crises’ elicited public scorn. Yet it was perfectly possible to have been right about the dangers of a crisis and then wrong about the dangers of crisis management. This author was one of many commentators who wrongly predicted that such large fiscal deficits would lead to rising bond yields. Especially wrong was the letter to Bernanke that I and others signed on 15 November 2010, which called for the policy of QE to be ‘reconsidered and discontinued’ as it ‘risk[ed] currency debasement and inflation’ and would not achieve ‘the Fed’s objective of promoting employment,’ but would merely ‘distort financial markets.’86 It took deeper research and reflection to appreciate that the expansion of central bank balance sheets would not be inflationary.87 Such confusion was widespread. A survey of 736 borrowing and investment institutions around the world in the summer of 2009 revealed an even split: almost as many were worried about inflation as were worried about deflation. One especially misleading signal was the surge of commodity prices between 2009 and 2011, which (as we have seen) was largely driven by China’s credit boom. Another false signal was the brief increase in US long-term interest rates in the summer of 2009. At around this time, the investment bank Morgan Stanley was forecasting that US ten-year yields would reach 5.5 per cent by 2010. (In fact, they fell below 3 per cent that year and below 2 per cent in 2012.) My own prediction in April 2009 of ‘a very painful tug-of-war between our monetary policy and our fiscal policy’ was misconceived and failed to anticipate the way QE would resolve the potential conflict. But better economists made similar mistakes. Indeed, the International Monetary Fund itself echoed the widespread fear that bloated deficits would lead to higher rates.

类似的误读是,这场危机预示着“后美国时代”的到来,正如德国财政部长佩尔·施泰因布吕克所言,“美国将失去其作为全球金融体系超级大国的地位。” 88事实上,这场危机反而巩固了美国在全球经济中的领导地位。此外,美国金融市场从危机中复苏的速度最快。而这离不开更多债务的支撑。据国际金融协会统计,2017年第三季度全球债务总额达到创纪录的233万亿美元。加拿大、法国、香港、韩国和瑞士的非金融部门私人债务均创历史新高。仿佛只有美国和部分欧洲家庭实现了“去杠杆化”——即便如此,他们的债务总额虽然相对于2007年可支配收入的比例大幅下降,但仍高于2000年的水平。 89在财政部的带动下,美国经济的其他部门以前所未有的规模举债。然而,与诸多预测相反,名义利率仍维持在历史低位。

A comparable misreading was that the crisis was the harbinger of a ‘post-American world’ and that, in the words of the German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück, ‘The U.S. [would] lose its status as the superpower of the global financial system.’88 In reality, the crisis reaffirmed American leadership of the world economy. Moreover, it was US financial markets that achieved the most rapid recovery from the crisis. And they did so with the help of yet more debt. According to the Institute of International Finance, total global debt reached a record $233 trillion in the third quarter of 2017. Private non-financial sector debt hit all-time highs in Canada, France, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Switzerland. It was as if only American and some European households had ‘de-levered’ – and even their pile of debt, though sharply reduced relative to 2007 as a proportion of disposable income, was still higher than it had been in 2000.89 Led by the Treasury, the other sectors of the US economy borrowed as never before. Yet, in defiance of so many predictions, nominal interest rates remained at historic lows.

对这一悖论最有影响力的解释是,世界经济正遭受“长期停滞”的困扰——这个术语最初由美国凯恩斯主义者阿尔文·汉森于 1938 年提出,随后六十年的美国经济表现证明这一说法是错误的,但哈佛大学经济学家拉里·萨默斯在 2013 年竞选美联储主席失败后不久又重新提出了这一说法。在随后的文章中,萨默斯对长期停滞进行了多种不同的定义,但最初他指的是“自然利率和均衡利率显著低于零的情况”,因此“零名义利率(货币政策下限)成为经济活动的长期系统性抑制剂,使我们的经济无法发挥其应有的潜力”。 90 后来,他进一步完善了这一论点:储蓄超过投资,导致总需求不足,进而造成经济停滞。这一问题的根源在于不平等、人口结构变化和财政政策的失败。91萨默斯论证的重点是一个无法衡量的利率:即“均衡实际利率”(经济学家用r*表示);这意味着,除非政策制定者对异常低的r*水平进行补偿,否则停滞(可能指经济增长停滞)将是一种长期甚至永久性的状态。

The most influential explanation for this paradox was that the world economy was suffering from ‘secular stagnation’ – a term first coined by the American Keynesian Alvin Hansen in 1938, falsified by the subsequent six decades of US economic performance, but revived by the Harvard economist Larry Summers in 2013 shortly after he had failed to secure the post of Fed chair. In subsequent articles, Summers defined secular stagnation in a variety of different ways, but at first he meant simply ‘a situation where natural and equilibrium interest rates have fallen significantly below zero’, so that the ‘zero nominal interest rate [monetary policy floor] is a chronic and systemic inhibitor of economic activity holding our economies back below their potential’.90 Later he refined the argument: saving was exceeding investment, leading to stagnation because of deficient aggregate demand. The roots of this problem were inequality, demographics and failures of fiscal policy.91 The focus of Summers’s argument was an unmeasurable rate: the ‘equilibrium real rate of interest’ (r* in the economists’ notation); the implication was that stagnation (presumably in terms of economic growth) would be a long-term if not permanent condition unless policymakers compensated for the abnormally low level of r*.

可观测实际利率(即名义利率减去预期通胀率)自20世纪80年代初以来确实有所下降,但在2008年后的十年间,除英国外,大多数主要经济体的实际利率仍为正值。这是因为名义利率虽然在20世纪80年代初高于通胀率,但并未低于通胀率。美国消费者价格通胀率仅在2012年和2016年短暂超过十年期国债名义收益率。如何解释实际利率的下降?经济学家提出了诸多原因:全球趋势增长预期疲软,这反过来又与全球劳动力供给增长率下降、教育水平提升速度放缓以及可能加剧的不平等现象有关;全球储蓄增加,这与全球抚养比下降(就业人口比例上升,而就业人口往往是储蓄者)以及新兴市场努力实现盈余和积累储备有关;全球投资下降,反映出资本品价格下跌、公共投资减少,或许也与投资者日益增长的“短期主义”有关。92经济史学家罗伯特·戈登也提出了类似的“增长逆风”,认为这是导致美国劳动力增长率下降的罪魁祸首。生产力。93研究美国劳动力市场的学者也注意到劳动力参与下降的人口结构驱动因素。然而,显然,所有这些都与金融危机没有任何实质性的关联:即使政策制定者没有允许金融体系过热并最终崩溃,这些“相互交织的复杂动态”也会持续数十年。94

Observable real rates – in the sense of nominal rates minus expected inflation – had certainly declined since the early 1980s, but they had remained positive in most major economies (except the UK) during the decade after 2008. This was because nominal rates had fallen from a higher level than inflation in the early 1980s but not to a lower level than inflation. Only fleetingly – in 2012 and in 2016 – did US consumer price inflation exceed the nominal yield on a ten-year bond. How to explain this decline in real rates? Economists identified numerous causes: weaker expectations for global trend growth, related in turn to the declining rate of growth of the global labour supply, the slowing pace of educational attainment and perhaps also the effects of increasing inequality; an increase in global saving linked to the decline in the global dependency ratio (the rising proportion of people in employment, who tend to be savers) and the efforts of emerging markets to run surpluses and accumulate reserves; and a decrease in global investment reflecting the falling price of capital goods, declining public investment and perhaps also growing ‘short-termism’ among investors.92 Similar ‘headwinds to growth’ were proposed by the economic historian Robert Gordon as the culprits for the falling rate of growth of US labour productivity.93 Students of the US labour market also noted the demographic drivers of falling labour force participation. Plainly, however, none of this was in any meaningful way related to the financial crisis: these ‘disparate confounding dynamics’ would have continued to operate over decades, even if policymakers had not allowed the financial system to overheat and then crash.94

危机伊始,两位哈佛大学经济学家卡门·莱因哈特和肯尼斯·罗格夫就提出了另一种观点。他们比较了几个世纪以来的多次金融危机,认为像2008-2009年那样巨大的冲击很可能之后会经历一段漫长的低增长期。95平均而言,1945年以后遭受金融危机冲击的国家需要4.4才能使人均收入恢复到危机前水平。而大萧条时期的国家平均需要十年时间。96罗格夫认为,“债务超级周期不会永远持续下去”。97一种方法是将2008年金融危机后的局面与1873年金融危机后的停滞和通货紧缩时期进行比较。这场当时被称为“大萧条”的危机虽然比1929年之后的危机程度要轻,但持续时间更长。始于1929年8月的经济萧条直到43个月后才达到谷底,而19世纪末的经济萧条则从1873年10月持续到1879年3月(长达65个月)。如果2008年后的经济出现类似的停滞期,那么在2013年5月之前将无法复苏。98关键在于,与萨默斯的论点相反,危机后的停滞更有可能是暂时的(尽管持续时间较长),而不是长期的。99

An alternative view had been put forward by two Harvard economists, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, at the very outset of the crisis. Comparing multiple financial crises over centuries, they argued that a shock as large as that of 2008–9 was very likely to be followed by a protracted period of lower growth.95 On average, it had taken countries hit by financial crises after 1945 4.4 years to get per capita income back to pre-crisis levels. The average for countries in the Great Depression had been ten years.96 ‘A debt super-cycle is not forever,’ Rogoff argued.97 Another approach was to compare the aftermath of 2008 with the period of stagnation and deflation that followed the 1873 financial crisis. This ‘great depression’ (as contemporaries had called it) was shallower than the one after 1929, but it was more protracted. The depression that began in August 1929 did not reach its nadir until forty-three months later, but the late-nineteenth-century depression lasted from October 1873 until March 1879 (sixty-five months). A similar period of stagnation after 2008 would have meant no recovery before May 2013.98 The key point was that, contrary to the Summers thesis, post-crisis stagnation was more likely to be temporary, albeit prolonged, than secular.99

当然,将当前经济形势与1873年后经济增长乏力、通胀率低甚至为负的时期进行类比并不完全恰当。两者之间存在两大主要区别。首先,21世纪的政策制定者拥有19世纪末期所不具备的财政和货币政策工具。这正是2009年至2018年间股市表现远优于1874年至1883年间的原因。其次,凯恩斯主义财政政策的后果是公共债务的累积,而公共债务一旦超过一定水平,本身就可能成为经济增长的阻力。经济学家们就债务占GDP比率过高会产生反作用的确切阈值展开了激烈的辩论,但有大量证据表明,公共债务相对于经济规模与实际利率之间存在正相关关系。 100财政和货币政策回旋余地的不足有助于解释为什么有些金融危机造成的“后遗症”比其他危机更为严重。 101

The analogy with the post-1873 period of subdued growth and low to negative inflation was not perfect, of course. There were two major differences. First, twenty-first-century policymakers had fiscal and monetary tools that were not available in the late nineteenth century. This was why the stock market performed significantly better between 2009 and 2018 than between 1874 and 1883. Secondly, the consequence of Keynesian fiscal policy was the accumulation of public debts that, beyond a certain level, were likely to act as a headwind to growth in their own right. Economists heatedly debated the exact threshold after which the debt-to-GDP ratio became counterproductively high, but there was ample evidence that a positive relationship existed between the size of public debt relative to the economy and the real interest rate.100 Lack of fiscal and monetary room for maneuver helped explain why some financial crises caused bigger ‘hangovers’ than others.101

然而,这种关系最明显地体现在美国,而不是欧洲。欧洲经济体在2007年合计占全球产出的五分之一,而欧洲的情况也为危机后复苏的缓慢提供了另一个关键解释。

It was not, however, in the United States that this relationship most clearly manifested itself. It was in Europe. And what happened there – in economies together accounting for a fifth of global output in 2007 – offers another key explanation for the sluggish nature of the post-crisis recovery.

9

9

从欧元到以太坊

From Euro to Ethereum

欧洲危机

The European Crisis

金钱至关重要。如果欧元从未诞生,如果欧盟各成员国在1999年后继续使用本国货币,那么大西洋东岸的金融危机将会截然不同。不幸的是,对于这些国家的人民而言,经济实力较弱的“边缘”国家——葡萄牙、爱尔兰、意大利、希腊和西班牙* ——都在1999年至2001年间采用了欧元,因此将货币政策的控制权拱手让给了位于法兰克福的欧洲中央银行,同时也接受了《稳定与增长公约》对其财政政策的限制。在德国,《稳定与增长公约》被视为加入货币联盟的交换条件。其后果与欧洲怀疑论者在欧洲央行成立之前所预测的几乎完全一致。¹

Money matters. Had the euro never been invented, and had all the various EU member states retained their national currencies after 1999, the financial crisis would have played out very differently on the eastern side of the Atlantic. Unfortunately for their inhabitants, the weaker ‘peripheral’ economies – Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain* – had all adopted the euro between 1999 and 2001 and had therefore ceded control of their monetary policies to the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, as well as accepting constraints on their fiscal policy under the Stability and Growth Pact that was regarded in Germany as a quid pro quo of monetary union. The consequences were much as had been predicted by Eurosceptics prior to the ECB’s creation.1

货币联盟能否在缺乏一定程度的财政联盟的情况下取得成功?历史表明,除非成员国实现比欧洲情况下可能达到的更高的跨境劳动力流动水平,或者比预期更快地实现银行监管的统一,或者比以往采取更大的财政紧缩措施,否则货币联盟无法成功。必须承认,在许多方面,欧元是成功的。消费者和企业都迅速适应了它。经济趋同程度相当显著——尤其是在利率方面——以欧元计价的新证券数量也远远超出怀疑论者的预期。但现实是,即便人员自由流动已写入欧洲法律,成员国的劳动力市场仍然相对分散。金融服务业的欧洲一体化程度极低。除少数大型机构外,大多数银行无论生前还是死后都保持着国家性质,稳坐本国大量主权债券的宝座。欧洲大陆的金融体系中,只有货币政策是超国家的。更重要的是,许多成员国对1997年《稳定与增长公约》的财政规则形同虚设。在金融危机爆发前夕,至少有九个欧盟成员国的债务占GDP比重高于美国,其中希腊和意大利的债务占比最高。无论如何,如果政府篡改预算账目,那么关于债务和赤字的规则就形同虚设。希腊政府从欧元诞生之初就系统性地这样做——而且是在华尔街银行的默许下进行的。通过互换交易将新增借款从公共资产负债表中转移出去,希腊政府得以在2009年初宣称,其次年的赤字仅占GDP的3.7%。然而,到了2009年底,真实数字被揭露为12.7%;到2010年5月,这一数字再次被修正为13.6%。正是这一揭露引发了欧洲金融危机,而欧洲金融危机与美国金融危机有着本质的区别。

Could a monetary union succeed in the absence of some measure of fiscal union? History suggested that it could not, unless the member states achieved much higher levels of cross-border labour mobility than seemed likely in the European case, or a much more rapid unification of bank regulation and supervision than was envisaged, or exercised much greater fiscal restraint than they had in the past. In many ways, it must be said, the euro was a success. Consumers and business adapted to it quickly, there was considerable economic convergence – above all with respect to interest rates – and far more new securities were denominated in euros than the sceptics had foreseen. But the reality was that the labour markets of the member states remained relatively segmented, even when free movement of people was enshrined in European law. There was minimal European integration of financial services. Except for a few big institutions, most banks remained national both in life and in death, reliably sitting on large piles of their home country’s sovereign bonds. Continental Europe had a financial system in which only monetary policy was supranational. Above all, multiple member states honoured the fiscal rules of the 1997 Stability and Growth Pact mainly in the breach. On the eve of the financial crisis, at least nine European Union member states had debt-to-GDP ratios higher than the United States, of which the largest were those of Greece and Italy. In any case, rules about debts and deficits were a sham if a government fiddled its budgetary accounts, as the Greek government did systematically – with the connivance of Wall Street banks – from the very launch of the euro. By using swaps to shift new borrowing off the public balance sheet, the Greek government was able to claim in early 2009 that its deficit the following year would be just 3.7 per cent of GDP. At the end of 2009 the true figure was revealed to be 12.7 per cent; by May 2010 it was corrected again to 13.6 per cent. It was this revelation that triggered the European phase of the financial crisis, which differed fundamentally from the American phase.

诚然,欧洲也经历了类似美国危机的局面。一些欧洲经济体——尤其是爱尔兰和波罗的海国家——经历了比美国更为剧烈的房地产市场繁荣与萧条。大多数欧洲国家的银行业规模相对而言要大得多,尽管其中三个最极端的例子(冰岛、瑞士和英国)都位于欧洲货币联盟之外。此外,许多欧洲银行和其他金融机构,包括养老基金,都曾大量涌入美国金融创新浪潮,大量投资于将AAA评级与更高评级相结合的CDO(担保债务凭证)。收益率高于更传统的固定收益工具。这意味着,2008年,欧洲银行很快步美国同行后尘,陷入资产减记和资产负债表收缩的恶性循环,以弥补损失。2

To be sure, Europe also had its version of the American crisis. A number of European economies – notably Ireland and the Baltic states – had experienced even larger housing booms and busts than the United States. Most had much bigger banking sectors in relative terms, though three of the most extreme cases (Iceland, Switzerland and the United Kingdom) were outside the European monetary union. And a great many European banks and other financial institutions, including pension funds, had gorged themselves at the trough of American financial innovation, investing heavily in CDOs that combined AAA ratings with higher returns than more conventional fixed-interest instruments. That meant that in 2008 European banks soon followed their American counterparts into the downward spiral of write-downs and balance sheet contraction to offset the losses.2

不同之处在于,美国拥有单一的中央银行和单一的财政部,只要其单一的议会——国会——愿意,它们就可以出手救助银行,应对经济衰退。此外,美国还拥有“特权”,可以印制世界主要储备货币和交易货币。作为一个相对中央集权的联邦制国家,美国早在建立国家中央银行之前就实现了财政联盟,因此能够将反周期财政政策和货币政策结合起来,而从富裕州向贫困州自动转移资金的做法几乎没有引起任何争议。加州纳税人,无论他们是否愿意,都通过联邦税款为救助总部位于纽约的银行做出了贡献。

The difference was that the United States had both a single central bank and a single finance ministry that was available to bail out the banks and counter the recession, so long as its single parliament, Congress, could be persuaded to do so. It also had the ‘exorbitant privilege’ of being able to print the world’s principal reserve and transaction currency. A relatively centralized federal state that had achieved fiscal union long before the creation of a national central bank, the United States was thus able to combine counter-cyclical fiscal and monetary policies, with almost no controversy over the automatic transfers from well-off to badly-off states. Californian taxpayers, whether they liked it or not, contributed through their federal tax payments to the bail-out of New York–based banks.

诚然,欧洲曾拥有一家中央银行,但它成立仅十年,欧元也一样。它没有统一的财政权威;相反,每个成员国,无论大小,都拥有自己的财政部、税收和债务工具。欧洲议会虽然存在,但在决策中的作用微乎其微,尤其是在危机时期。理论上,权力掌握在代表成员国政府的部长理事会手中。但实际上,最大的国家——德国——行使着非正式的否决权。德国政界人士和纳税人都没有承诺帮助希腊银行。事实上,没有任何机制能够阻止由“核心”国家主导的紧缩货币和财政政策将欧洲边缘地区拖入经济衰退。

Europe had a single central bank, to be sure, but it was only a decade old, as was the European currency. It had no unified fiscal authority; instead each member state, large and small alike, had its own finance ministry, its own taxes, its own debt instruments. There was a European Parliament, but its role in decision-making was minimal, especially in a crisis. In theory, power lay with the Council of Ministers representing the governments of the member states. In practice, the biggest state – Germany – exercised an informal veto power. There was no commitment on the part of German politicians or taxpayers to help Greek banks. There was in fact nothing to prevent tight monetary and fiscal policy, dictated by the ‘core’ countries, from plunging peripheral Europe into depression.

令许多外国观察家感到惊讶的是,欧元竟然挺过了这场危机。保罗·克鲁格曼在2010年4月至2012年7月期间至少11次预测欧元即将崩溃。³并非孤例;这是新英格兰的“咸水经济学家”和芝加哥的“淡水经济学家”为数不多的共识之一。经济学家们犯的错误在于,他们认为经济因素会决定最终结果。有人认为,欧元区并非“最优货币区”,因此必然会解体。但实际上,这个问题本质上是政治性的。德国总理默克尔、财政部长朔伊布勒以及默克尔的顾问魏德曼对欧洲应效仿美国采取大胆的货币和财政措施的论调感到震惊。2009年,欧洲央行推出了“长期再融资操作”,分两期向陷入困境的欧洲银行提供总额超过1万亿欧元的低成本融资。这使得这些银行能够购买约4000亿欧元的国债:欧洲政府债券收益率与欧洲央行低贷款利率之间的“利差”看起来就像是唾手可得的钱。德国的反对之声毫不掩饰。 2010年5月和2011年8月,欧洲央行行长让-克洛德·特里谢推出证券市场计划购买政府债券,德国联邦银行行长阿克塞尔·韦伯和欧洲央行理事会成员于尔根·斯塔克对此再也无法忍受。2011年2月,韦伯宣布辞职,放弃了接替特里谢的希望。七个月后,斯塔克也辞职了。同年11月,法国和美国总统试图说服默克尔支持一项1400亿欧元的欧元区救助基金,但魏德曼——如今韦伯在德国联邦银行的继任者——反对这项计划。2012年3月,默克尔成功说服除英国和捷克共和国外的所有欧盟成员国签署新的《财政契约》,这是一项政府间协议,规定各国预算赤字上限为GDP的0.5%。由于欧猪五国(PIIGS)的利率和失业率迅速上升,这种做法越来越没有意义。

The surprising thing, to many foreign observers, was that the euro survived this crisis. Paul Krugman predicted the imminent collapse of the euro at least eleven times between April 2010 and July 2012.3 He was not alone; it was one of the few issues on which the ‘saltwater’ economists of New England and the ‘freshwater’ economists of Chicago agreed. The mistake the economists made was to believe that economics would decide the issue and that, as the Eurozone was not an ‘optimal currency area’, it would inevitably fall apart. In reality the issue was political. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, her Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, and Merkel’s adviser Jens Weidmann heard with alarm the argument that Europe should follow the American lead in adopting bold monetary and fiscal measures. In 2009 the ECB introduced ‘long term refinancing operations’ – cheap funding for troubled European banks in two tranches worth more than a trillion euros. This enabled the banks to purchase around €400 billion of sovereign debt: the ‘carry’ between European government bond yields and the ECB’s low lending rates seemed like easy money. German opposition was thinly veiled. When the president of the ECB, Jean-Claude Trichet, introduced a Securities Markets Program to buy government bonds in May 2010 and August 2011, Bundesbank president Axel Weber and ECB board member Jürgen Stark could endure no more. In February 2011, Weber announced his resignation, abandoning hope of succeeding Trichet. He was followed seven months later by Stark. In November of the same year, the French and American presidents tried to persuade Merkel to back a €140 billion Eurozone bail-out fund, but Weidmann – now Weber’s successor at the Bundesbank – opposed the plan. In March 2012, Merkel succeeded in persuading all but two EU member states (Britain and the Czech Republic demurred) to commit themselves to a new Fiscal Compact, an intergovernmental agreement that imposed a cap of 0.5 per cent of GDP on national budget deficits. With interest rates and unemployment rising rapidly in the PIIGS, this made less and less sense.

如果德国的做法被贯彻到底——财政紧缩和货币紧缩——欧洲货币联盟能否存续令人怀疑。然而,尽管德国小报媒体反对,柏林并未阻止任命意大利人马里奥·德拉吉为欧洲央行行长。德拉吉虽然并非通胀鸽派,但他敏锐地意识到欧洲当时面临的生死攸关的危机。2012年5月,在接替特里谢六个月后,他宣称:“我们已经到了一个关键时刻,欧洲一体化进程需要一次勇敢的飞跃。”为了生存,政治想象力应运而生。4三种工具应运而生。第一种是建立欧洲银行业联盟,这意味着(用欧盟委员会的提案来说)“一体化的金融监管和单一的存款担保机制”,或许还包括通过新的欧洲稳定机制对脆弱银行进行资本重组。第二种是根据经济合作与发展组织的提案,发行“新的联合担保政府债券”,以“帮助银行资本重组并提高信贷可得性”。5第三种(也许也是最显而易见的)是欧洲央行应该效仿其他主要央行的做法,实施量化宽松政策。

Had the German approach been pursued to its logical conclusion – fiscal austerity and tight money – it is doubtful that Europe’s monetary union would have survived. However, despite the objections of the German tabloid press, Berlin did not prevent the appointment of an Italian – Mario Draghi – as ECB president. Though no dove on inflation, Draghi grasped the mortal peril Europe now faced. ‘We have reached a point,’ he declared in May 2012, six months after taking over from Trichet, ‘in which the process of European integration needs a courageous leap of political imagination in order to survive.’4 Three instruments suggested themselves. The first was a European banking union, meaning (in the words of a European Commission proposal) ‘integrated financial supervision and a single deposit guarantee scheme’, and perhaps also the recapitalization of vulnerable banks through a new European Stability Mechanism. The second was the creation of ‘new jointly-guaranteed government bonds’, according to a proposal from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, ‘to help recapitalize banks and enhance credit availability’.5 The third (and perhaps most obvious) was that the ECB should follow the example of the other major central banks and engage in QE.

德国的困境十分棘手。正如德国新任欧洲央行行长约尔格·阿斯穆森所言,“解决这场危机的责任主要在于各国政府”,这固然没错。然而,拒绝所有改革方案只能导致一个结果:至少有一个国家——希腊——将被迫退出欧元区。2012年夏天,“希腊退出欧元区”(Grexit)的计划确实存在,而且当时的财政部长朔伊布勒似乎也准备执行该计划。但这位前物理学家默克尔深谙连锁反应之道,她明白一个国家退出欧元区将会动摇所有欧元区外围经济体的成员国地位。就在希腊人发现他们的欧元一夜之间变回德拉克马的同时,爱尔兰、意大利、葡萄牙和西班牙银行的储户也担心他们的欧元会以类似的方式被重新计价为本金、里拉、埃斯库多和比塞塔——所有这些货币都注定会相对于失去其弱势用户群体的核心欧元迅速贬值。德国总理脑海中浮现出一幅噩梦般的景象:多地发生银行挤兑,欧洲内部贸易崩溃。或许更重要的是,许多德国银行当时已经积累了大量外围国家政府债券,正是因为这些债券的收益率高于德国国债。希腊退出欧元区对它们来说将是灾难性的。默克尔按兵不动,希腊也留在了欧盟。

The German dilemma was a painful one. It was all very well to say, as the country’s new ECB board member Jörg Asmussen put it, that ‘the bulk of the responsibility for resolving this crisis lies with national governments.’ However, to reject all reform proposals could only mean one thing: that at least one country, Greece, would be driven to leave the monetary union. A plan for ‘Grexit’ certainly existed in the summer of 2012, and it would seem that Finance Minister Schäuble was ready to execute it. But the former physicist Merkel understood enough about chain reactions to see that the departure of one country from the euro would call into question the membership of all the peripheral economies. At the same moment that Greeks found their euros turned overnight back into drachmas, depositors in Irish, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish banks would have reason to fear that their euros might in a similar fashion be redenominated as punts, liras, escudos and pesetas – all destined to depreciate rapidly relative to a core euro now shorn of its weaker users. A nightmare vision presented itself to the German chancellor of multiple bank runs and a breakdown of intra-European trade. Perhaps more importantly, many German banks had by now accumulated large holdings of peripheral government bonds, precisely because they yielded more than German Bunds. Grexit would be catastrophic for them. Merkel stayed her hand and Greece stayed on board.

然而,德国人只希望看到结局——保存下来。货币联盟的问题。他们犹豫不决,不愿采取必要的手段。默克尔说,她“在任何情况下”都不会同意发行欧元债券。“(人们)跑来要求发行欧元债券,说我们只需要利率平等,一切都会好起来的。”用她副财长的话来说,欧元债券“在错误的时间开出的药方,会带来错误的副作用”。德意志银行联席首席执行官于尔根·菲琛将希腊描述为“一个失败国家……一个腐败的国家”,这无疑加剧了矛盾。就连建立银行业联盟的必要性也只是勉强承认。“根本问题相对简单,”一位柏林政府官员被引述说,“我们的伙伴真的想要更多欧洲一体化,还是仅仅想要更多德国的钱?”当意大利新任总理、学者型“技术官僚”马里奥·蒙蒂提议授权欧洲央行购买债券时,默克尔依然态度坚决。她认为,欧洲量化宽松政策是绝对不可能的。

However, the Germans willed only the end – the preservation of monetary union. They hesitated to will the means. ‘Under no circumstances’ would Merkel agree to Eurobonds, she said. ‘[People] come along and ask for euro bonds, saying all we need are equal interest rates and everything will turn out all right.’6 Eurobonds would be – in the words of her deputy finance minister – ‘a prescription at the wrong time with the wrong side-effects’. It did not help matters when Jürgen Fitschen, joint chief executive of Deutsche Bank, described Greece as ‘a failed state . . . a corrupt state’. Even the need for a banking union was only grudgingly conceded. ‘The fundamental question is relatively simple,’ a government official in Berlin was quoted as saying. ‘Do our partners really want more Europe, or do they just want more German money?’ When a new Italian prime minister, the academic ‘technocrat’ Mario Monti, proposed that the ECB be empowered to buy bonds, Merkel remained adamant. There could be no European QE.

不从金融史中吸取教训的人注定要重蹈覆辙。20世纪20年代,德国是欧洲的“边缘”经济体之一:债务缠身,出口竞争力不足,政治动荡。魏玛共和国受制于金本位制(一种固定汇率制度,而非货币联盟),即便世界经济正滑向萧条,也试图通过通货紧缩政策来克服自身问题。紧缩的货币政策和平衡的预算导致产出暴跌,失业率飙升。最终,德国债务违约,魏玛共和国崩溃。20世纪30年代初的教训是,债权人应该对不可持续的债务负担宽容一些,货币约束在金融危机中可能成为“黄金枷锁”。然而,德国政界和公众显然只吸取了20世纪20年代初的教训:通过无限增发货币来弥补巨额政府赤字最终会导致恶性通货膨胀。令人惊讶的是,2013年,近30%的德国人将通货膨胀列为“德国最迫切需要解决的问题之一”——而当时的通货膨胀率正下降到接近1%(第二年更是跌破零)。最简洁的解决方案本应是减记……希腊政府债务的一部分——称之为重组而非违约——然后用纳税人的钱注资,补偿遭受损失的银行(债券市场行话称之为“减记”)。尽管美国经济学家建议这样做,德国也曾考虑过,但这一方案遭到了希腊政府、法国政府和欧洲央行的反对。7唯一取得的真正进展是将规模小且仓促成立的欧洲金融稳定基金转型为永久性的欧洲稳定机制,使其拥有购买政府债券的权力(但只能在二级债券市场购买)。

Those who do not learn from financial history are doomed to repeat it. In the 1920s Germany had been one of Europe’s ‘peripheral’ economies: weighed down by debt, uncompetitive as an exporter, politically unstable. Constrained by the gold exchange standard (a system of fixed exchange rates, rather than a monetary union), the Weimar Republic had sought to overcome its problems with deflationary policies even as the world slid into depression. Tight money and a balanced budget caused output to plummet and unemployment to soar. The result was that Germany defaulted on its debts and the Weimar Republic collapsed. The lessons of the early 1930s were that creditors should be forgiving of unsustainable debt burdens, and that monetary constraints may act as ‘golden fetters’ in a financial crisis. The German political class and the German public had apparently learned only the lesson of the early 1920s: that large government deficits financed by unlimited money creation ultimately lead to hyperinflation. Amazingly, in 2013, nearly 30 per cent of Germans named inflation as ‘one of the most urgent problems that needs to be solved in Germany’ – at a time when the inflation rate was falling towards 1 per cent (it fell below zero the following year). The cleanest solution would have been to write down a share of the Greek government debt – calling it a restructuring rather than a default – and then to compensate the banks that suffered losses (‘haircuts’, in bond-market slang) with capital injections funded by taxpayers. Though recommended by US economists and considered by the Germans, this course of action was opposed by the Greek government, the French government and the ECB.7 The only real progress came with the transformation of the small and hastily established European Financial Stability Facility into a permanent European Stability Mechanism with the power to buy government bonds (but only on secondary bond markets).

欧元区当时已接近崩溃边缘。危机爆发前,意大利和德国债券之间的利差微乎其微:意大利十年期国债的交易价格仅比德国同类国债高出25至30个基点——实际上,意大利政府支付给投资者的利率比德国政府高出0.25%。到2011年底,利差飙升至500个基点——相当于5个百分点的差距——并在2012年7月下旬再次达到类似的水平。西班牙和意大利的利差峰值约为600个基点,爱尔兰为1200个基点,葡萄牙略低于1500个基点,希腊则超过1800个基点——换句话说,高达18%。这些数字不仅意味着借款人将面临高得令人难以承受的利率,也预示着这些国家债券价格的急剧下跌。这意味着持有外围国家政府债务的机构——即欧元区所有经济体(包括核心经济体和外围经济体)的主要银行——将遭受灾难性损失。德国人无法忽视这些损失:他们自己的金融机构也正遭受着同样的损失。

The Eurozone was now approaching breaking point. In the period prior to the crisis, the spread between Italian and German bonds had been trivial: an Italian ten-year bond traded at 25 to 30 basis points above its German equivalent – in effect, the Italian government had to pay investors a rate 0.25 per cent higher than the German government. By the end of 2011, the spread had soared to 500 basis points – a five percentage point differential – and it returned to similar heights in late July 2012. For Spain and Italy, the peak spread was around 600 basis points, for Ireland 1200, for Portugal just under 1500 and for Greece above 1800 – in other words, 18 per cent. Not only did these figures imply prohibitively high interest rates for borrowers; they also signified a drastic decline in the price of these countries’ bonds. This implied disastrous losses for the institutions holding the peripheral governments’ debt – namely the major banks of all the Eurozone economies, core and periphery alike. Here were losses the Germans could not ignore: the ones being suffered by their own financial institutions.

人们常说,马里奥·德拉吉用三个字拯救了欧元:“不惜一切代价”。2012年7月26日,他在伦敦的一次会议上宣布:“在我们的职权范围内,欧洲央行准备不惜一切代价捍卫欧元。相信我,这足以做到。” 8这番话是即兴的。然而,同样重要的是安格拉·默克尔没有说的话。 9尽管她的顾问们感到不安,但她还是默许了。德拉吉随后继续了他的抗争。欧洲央行宣布了一项新机制——“直接货币交易”(OMT),根据该机制,在特定条件下,欧洲央行将在二级市场购买政府债券。魏德曼投票反对OMT,但德国的反对似乎已沦为象征性的。如果德拉吉认为合适,并且能够争取到其他执行委员会成员的支持,欧洲央行完全可以而且将会无视德国的立场采取行动。

It is often said that Mario Draghi saved the euro with three words: ‘whatever it takes’. ‘Within our mandate,’ he declared at a conference in London on 26 July 2012, ‘the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough.’8 This was unscripted. Equally important, however, were the words Angela Merkel did not say.9 Despite the disquiet of her advisers, she tacitly acquiesced. Draghi followed his fighting words by announcing a new device – ‘outright monetary transactions’ – whereby, under certain conditions, the ECB would buy a government’s bonds in secondary markets. Weidmann voted against OMT, but it was beginning to look as if German opposition was now symbolic. The ECB could and would act in defiance of Germany if Draghi saw fit and could carry the rest of the executive board with him.

尽管承诺为外围国家政府的债务提供担保从未真正落实,但这一承诺足以压低债券利差。然而,欧元区危机远未结束。即使在2012年夏季之后,欧洲央行仍然采取与其他央行不同的政策路线。2012年末至2013年初,其资产负债表实际上有所缩减,直到2015年1月,德拉吉才得以承诺欧洲央行全面实施量化宽松政策。诚然,外围国家债券利差在2012年下半年显著收窄,但仍远高于危机前的水平。这意味着外围经济体的银行体系依然脆弱,企业贷款利率远高于欧洲央行接近于零的政策利率。 2013年,经济复苏似乎遥遥无期。当年希腊的失业率接近28%,西班牙为26%,葡萄牙为16%,爱尔兰为13%,意大利也接近13%。德国的失业率仅为5%。南欧的青年失业率甚至更高。2007年至2013年间,希腊的人均收入(经通胀调整后)下降了26%,意大利下降了12%,西班牙下降了11%,葡萄牙下降了7%,爱尔兰下降了6%。希腊经济连续六年陷入衰退。

The pledge to backstop the peripheral governments’ debt – though it was never acted upon – sufficed to drive down the bond spreads. Nevertheless, the Eurozone crisis was far from over. Even after the summer of 2012, the ECB continued to pursue a different course from the other central banks. Between late 2012 and early 2013, its balance sheet actually shrank, and it was not until January 2015 that Draghi was able to commit the ECB to full-fledged QE. True, the peripheral bond spreads tightened significantly in the second half of 2012, but they remained far above their pre-crisis levels. That meant that banks remained frail in the peripheral economies and corporate lending rates remained much higher than the ECB’s near-zero policy rate. Economic recovery seemed a distant prospect in 2013. The unemployment rate in that year was just under 28 per cent in Greece, 26 per cent in Spain, 16 per cent in Portugal, 13 per cent in Ireland and just under 13 per cent in Italy. In Germany it was just 5 per cent. Youth unemployment rates were even worse in southern Europe. Between 2007 and 2013, per capita income (on an inflation-adjusted basis) fell by 26 per cent in Greece, 12 per cent in Italy, 11 per cent in Spain, 7 per cent in Portugal and 6 per cent in Ireland. The Greek economy was in recession for six consecutive years.

将南欧问题归咎于财政挥霍,就好比说美国金融危机是放松管制造成的一样简单化。事实上,德国(以及其他倾向于认同德国做法的北欧国家)过度关注财政指标,几乎可以肯定地导致欧洲危机持续时间比原本可能的情况更长。正如我们所看到的,显而易见的反事实问题是:如果没有货币联盟,欧洲危机的严重程度会有多高?答案无疑是,南欧的危机程度会轻得多,因为当地货币会贬值,从而恢复竞争力(即便只是暂时的,就像过去那样);而北欧的危机程度则会略高一些,因为瑞士的某些经验可能会重演,货币升值,通货紧缩成为主要问题。一个不太明显的反事实问题是:如果德国人要求的是结构性改革协议而不是财政协议,结果又会如何?

To say that the problem of southern Europe was one of fiscal profligacy was as simplistic as to say that the US financial crisis was the result of deregulation. Indeed, the excessive focus on fiscal indicators by the Germans (and the other northern European countries inclined to agree with them) almost certainly ensured that the European crisis was more protracted than it might otherwise have been. As we have seen, the obvious counterfactual question is: How severe would the European crisis have been if there had been no monetary union? The answer is surely that it would have been much less severe in southern Europe, where currencies would have weakened, restoring competitiveness (if only temporarily, as in the past), and slightly more severe in northern Europe, where some version of the Swiss experience would have played out, with currencies strengthening and deflation becoming the principal problem. A less obvious counterfactual question would be: What if the Germans had demanded a structural reform compact rather than a fiscal compact?

各国为削减外围国家政府的财政赤字做出了巨大努力。在危机初期,这些赤字曾飙升至惊人的高度。据国际货币基金组织(IMF)统计,2010年爱尔兰的预算赤字占GDP的32%,希腊前一年则为15%。截至撰写本文时,欧元区成员国中预计赤字最高的国家是法国,该国通常被视为核心成员国,其赤字占GDP的3%。爱尔兰的赤字占GDP的0.2%,希腊为1.1%,意大利为1.3%,葡萄牙为1.4%,西班牙为2.5%。结构性预算平衡证明了财政整顿的努力卓有成效。然而,由于缺乏实质性的结构性改革,其代价是经济增长缓慢和失业率居高不下,因此,除爱尔兰外,外围国家在减轻整体债务负担方面收效甚微。事实上,希腊的债务占GDP比重预计将在2018年达到峰值184%,而意大利的这一比重在2017年已达到峰值133%。如果目标是将南欧国家变成德国,那么仅从赤字方面来看,这一目标就已经实现了——不仅是预算赤字,还有经常账户赤字。

Enormous efforts were made to reduce the deficits of peripheral governments. These had soared to enormous heights in the initial phase of the crisis. According to the IMF, Ireland’s budget deficit was 32 per cent of GDP in 2010, Greece’s 15 per cent the year before. At the time of writing, the highest projected deficit for a Eurozone member is 3 per cent, and the country in question is France, conventionally regarded as a member of the core. Ireland has a deficit of 0.2 per cent of GDP, Greece 1.1 per cent, Italy 1.3, Portugal 1.4, Spain 2.5. The structural budget balances attest to heroic efforts of fiscal consolidation. Yet, in the absence of meaningful structural reforms, the price has been low growth and high unemployment, so that – with the notable exception of Ireland – little has been done to reduce the total debt burdens of the periphery. Indeed, the Greek debt-to-GDP ratio is forecast to peak in 2018 at 184 per cent, Italy’s to have peaked in 2017 at 133 per cent. If the goal was to convert southern Europeans into Germans, it has been achieved in the realm of deficits alone – not only budgetary but also current account deficits.

危机爆发前,欧元区由盈余国和赤字国组成,不仅南部和西部的边缘经济体存在经常账户赤字,东部的新成员国也存在赤字。西北欧则是盈余国。对于货币联盟的普通观察者来说,这似乎是一种合理的安排。然而,如今经过多年的紧缩政策,边缘国家的赤字几乎消失殆尽。预计2018年欧元区只有五个国家会出现经常账户赤字,而且赤字规模都微乎其微(塞浦路斯的赤字最大,为2.7)。(占GDP的百分比)。相比之下,荷兰的盈余占GDP的10%;德国略低于8%。除了让整个欧元区在外界看来比十年前更像一个扩大的德国之外,这种做法究竟取得了什么成果尚不完全清楚。在2000年至2008年期间,欧元区与世界其他地区的贸易额在小幅赤字和小幅盈余之间波动。自危机以来,其经常账户盈余稳步增长,2017年达到GDP的3.5%,预计未来五年将保持在3%左右。

Prior to the crisis, the Eurozone was composed of surplus and deficit countries, with not only the peripheral economies of the south and west running current account deficits, but also the new member states of the east. Northwestern Europe was the land of surpluses. To a casual observer of monetary unions, this seemed a reasonable arrangement. Today, by contrast, after years of austerity, the peripheral deficits have all but disappeared. Just five Eurozone countries are expected to run current account deficits in 2018, and all are negligible in size (Cyprus’s is the largest at 2.7 per cent of GDP). The Dutch surplus, by contrast, is 10 per cent of GDP; the German just under 8 per cent. It is not entirely clear what has been achieved by this, save to make the entire Eurozone look – to the outside world – a good deal more like an enlarged Germany than it was ten years ago. In the years 2000 until 2008, the Eurozone oscillated between small deficits and small surpluses with the rest of the world. Since the crisis, its current account surplus has risen steadily to reach 3.5 per cent of combined GDP in 2017 and it is forecast to remain at around 3 per cent for the next five years.

然而,除了削减赤字之外,南欧国家在其他大多数方面并没有变成德国人。欧洲劳动力市场的融合程度也没有显著提高。2014年,美国50个州中失业率最高和最低的差距约为6个百分点,经济繁荣的北达科他州失业率略高于2%,而经济低迷的罗德岛州失业率略高于8%。但欧元区内部的失业率差异要大得多,德国和希腊之间的失业率差距超过20个百分点。在紧缩政策的压力下,单位劳动力成本确实趋于一致,但这却是一个缓慢的过程。竞争力、制度质量(例如法治)和营商便利度等指标表明,货币联盟和财政约束相结合,对欧元区内部的结构性趋同作用甚微。一项以财政支持换取减轻过时政府法规对私营部门造成负担的结构性改革协议,无疑会取得更积极的成果。

Yet in most other respects, aside from cutting their deficits, southern Europeans did not become Germans. The European labour market did not become significantly more integrated. The difference between the highest unemployment rate and the lowest among the fifty US states in 2014 was around six percentage points, with booming North Dakota on just over 2 per cent and somnolent Rhode Island on just above 8. But the dispersion in unemployment rates within the Eurozone was much higher, with more than twenty percentage points separating Germany and Greece. Unit labour costs certainly converged under the pressure of austerity, but it was a slow process. Measures of competitiveness, institutional quality (such as the rule of law) and ease of doing business suggest that the combination of monetary union and fiscal constraint has done relatively little to bring about structural convergence within the Eurozone. A structural reform compact that traded fiscal support for alleviation of the burdens imposed on the private sector by antiquated government regulations would surely have had more positive results.

人们经常声称——尤其是希腊前财政部长亚尼斯·瓦鲁法基斯——德国无情地对希腊和其他外围国家实施了紧缩政策。这种说法具有误导性。事实上,所有外围经济体都得到了欧洲央行债券购买计划的救助。此外,2010年至2013年间,希腊获得了超过800亿欧元(880亿美元)的新增净贷款和援助,约占其GDP的10%。 10 欧盟委员会、欧洲中央银行和国际货币基金组织——即所谓的“三驾马车”——提供的援助要慷慨得多。与国际货币基金组织在20世纪90年代末金融危机期间对亚洲国家的援助相比,三驾马车对希腊、塞浦路斯和葡萄牙的援助力度更大。11如果没有三驾马车的支持,为弥补外债突然停止而需要采取的紧缩措施将会更加痛苦。

It is often claimed – mostly loudly by the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis – that Germany heartlessly imposed austerity on Greece and other peripheral countries. This is misleading. All the peripheral economies were effectively bailed out by ECB bond purchases. In addition, Greece received over €80 billion ($88 billion) in net new loans and aid from 2010 to 2013, equal to around 10 per cent of its GDP.10 Together, the European Commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund – the so-called troika – were a good deal more generous towards Greece, as well as Cyprus and Portugal, than the IMF had been towards Asian countries in financial crises of the late 1990s.11 Without troika support, the austerity needed to compensate for the sudden stop in foreign lending would have been even more painful.

第一个问题是时机。在每起案例中,援助都是在最艰难的谈判之后,在最后一刻才提供的,这造成了最大的不确定性,并确保在资金到位之前经济出现最大程度的混乱。第二个问题是附加条件。西班牙、爱尔兰和葡萄牙认真致力于进行结构性改革,并在经济增长和创造就业方面取得了相应的回报,而意大利和希腊却拖延不决。意大利为了避免附加条件而拒绝了援助。希腊接受了援助,但认为可以规避这些条件。不难预见,这将带来意想不到的政治和社会后果。

The first problem was one of timing. In each case, the assistance was provided at the last possible moment, after the most fraught of negotiations, thereby creating the maximum amount of uncertainty, and ensuring the greatest possible economic dislocation before the money was made available. The second problem was one of conditionality. While Spain, Ireland and Portugal made serious efforts to undertake structural reforms – with commensurate payoffs in terms of growth and job creation – Italy and Greece dragged their feet. The Italians declined aid in order to avoid conditionality. The Greeks took the aid but thought they could evade the conditions. That this would have unintended political as well as social consequences was not difficult to foresee.

监管国家

Regulation Nation

如果金融危机的主要原因真的是放松管制,那么显而易见的解决方案自然就是加强监管。至少,《纽约时报》的读者们是这么认为的。但究竟应该监管什么呢?雷曼兄弟倒闭后,各种大胆的建议层出不穷。波士顿大学经济学家拉里·科特利科夫(Larry Kotlikoff)主张实行“有限用途银行”,这将终结部分准备金制度,使银行成为投资者和共同基金之间无杠杆的中介机构。财经记者马丁·沃尔夫(Martin Wolf)和斯坦福大学经济学家约翰·科克伦(John Cochrane)也提出了类似的“狭义”银行制度。 2013年卸任英格兰银行行长后不久,默文·金(Mervyn King)就支持了一些略显温和的拆分大型银行的提议。并限制存款机构的冒险行为,同时将中央银行的角色从“最后贷款人”转变为“全天候典当行” 。13

If it was true that the principal cause of the financial crisis was deregulation, then the obvious solution to the problem was presumably regulation. So, at least, it seemed to readers of the New York Times. But what exactly was to be regulated? In the immediate aftermath of the failure of Lehman Brothers, all kinds of bold suggestions were made. The Boston University economist Larry Kotlikoff argued for ‘limited purpose banking’, which would have put an end to fractional reserve banking, turning banks into unleveraged intermediaries between investors and mutual funds. The financial journalist Martin Wolf made a similar argument for ‘narrow’ banking, as did the Stanford economist John Cochrane.12 Shortly after stepping down as Governor of the Bank of England in 2013, Mervyn King lent his support to slightly less radical proposals to break up the biggest banks and limit the risk-taking behaviour of deposit-taking institutions, as well as to modify the central bank’s role from that of ‘lender of last resort’ to ‘pawnbroker for all seasons’.13

实际上,此类方案大多局限于《金融时报》《华尔街日报》的评论版面。在国际层面,修改银行监管条例的真正工作仍然掌握在专业监管机构手中,特别是1974年由世界十大央行设立的巴塞尔银行监管委员会,以及2009年4月成立的金融稳定理事会(原金融稳定论坛的扩展版)。巴塞尔委员会于1988年首次发布了一套银行最低资本要求。在金融危机爆发时,一套修订后的标准(巴塞尔协议II)仍在制定过程中。因此,更新后的规则手册(巴塞尔协议III)是在2010-2011年危机最严峻的时期制定的,其目的显然是为了比之前的版本更加严格,不仅在杠杆率方面,而且在流动性和融资方面也是如此。巴塞尔协议III将银行资本要求提高了近一倍,并设立了稳定资金比率要求,旨在降低银行对批发融资市场的依赖。尽管有人抱怨这些措施会推高银行的资本成本,但它们远没有科特利科夫和金设想的那么激进。银行的基本商业模式,包括其资产负债期限固有的不匹配以及易受挤兑的影响,并未改变,一些有问题的做法——尤其是银行对风险价值模型的依赖——也未受到质疑。此外,新规(原计划于2019年3月底在大多数市场实施)实际上承认,任何可实现的私营部门资本缓冲都不足以使中央银行摆脱其在危机中作为最后贷款人的角色。

In practice, such schemes remained largely confined to the opinion pages of the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal. At the international level, the real business of modifying the banking regulations remained in the hands of the professional regulators, in particular the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision that had been set up by the world’s top ten central banks in 1974, as well as the Financial Stability Board, established in April 2009 as an expanded version of the old Financial Stability Forum. The Basel Committee had first published a set of minimum capital requirements for banks in 1988. A revised set of standards (Basel II) was still in the process of being adopted when the financial crisis struck. The updated rulebook (Basel III) was therefore devised in the heat of the crisis in 2010–11 and was certainly intended to be more stringent than its predecessor with respect not only to leverage but also to liquidity and funding. Basel III roughly doubled* bank capital requirements and established net stable funding ratio requirements designed to reduce banks’ reliance on wholesale funding markets. Despite complaints that they will drive up the cost of capital for banks, these measures were far less radical than the ones envisaged by Kotlikoff and King. The fundamental business model, with its inherent mismatch between asset and liability maturities, and its susceptibility to runs, was not altered and a number of questionable practices – notably the banks’ reliance on value-at-risk models – went unchallenged. Moreover, the new regulations (which were scheduled to be introduced in most markets by the end of March 2019) implicitly conceded that no attainable private sector capital cushions would suffice to free central banks from their role as lenders of last resort in a crisis.

即便巴塞尔委员会的技术官僚们试图在国际层面更新现状,大西洋两岸的政府也在危机后努力改善本国的金融监管。很少有不满的选民向巴塞尔的那些“专家”表达意见,他们基本上不受民主进程及其不满情绪的影响,继续着自己的工作。但在国内政治中,即使在意大利或希腊等技术官僚曾短暂掌权的国家,情况也截然不同。民众对银行家们获得慷慨救助而非严厉监禁*的愤怒日益高涨,迫使欧美政客做出回应,至少在一段时间内如此。沃尔克规则的兴衰便是这一过程的完美例证。

Even as the technocrats of the Basel Committee sought to update the status quo at the international level, governments on both sides of the Atlantic attempted to improve national financial regulation in the wake of the crisis. Few disgruntled voters made their views known to the gnomes of Basel, who went about their business largely insulated from the democratic process and its discontents. In national politics, even in those countries such as Italy or Greece where technocrats briefly took the helm, the story was different. Mounting popular indignation that the bankers had received generous bail-outs – as opposed to stiff jail sentences* – forced American and European politicians to respond, at least for a time. A perfect illustration of this process was the rise and demise of the Volcker Rule.

前美联储主席保罗·沃尔克是经验不足的奥巴马总统求助的几位资深政治家之一。沃尔克认为,危机的主要原因是银行参与对冲基金、私募股权以及自营交易。2009年,他提议禁止银行或银行控股公司从事所有这些活动。2010年2月,五位前财政部长支持了这项规则。然而,到同年6月,沃尔克规则已被削弱,允许银行将其高达3%的资产投资于对冲基金和私募股权。到2013年12月,该规则的最终文本公布时,对自营交易的禁令也被弱化,允许承销、做市和风险规避对冲等活动获得豁免。2014年1月,面对诉讼,监管机构同意允许小型银行持有某些类型的担保贷款凭证。

The former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker had been one of the elder statesmen to whom the inexperienced President Obama had turned. In Volcker’s view, a principal cause of the crisis had been the involvement of banks in hedge funds and private equity, as well as in proprietary trading. In 2009, he proposed that banks or bank holding companies be banned from all these activities. In February 2010, five former Secretaries of the Treasury endorsed the rule. By June that same year, however, the Volcker Rule had already been diluted to allow banks to invest up to 3 per cent of their assets in hedge funds and private equity. By December 2013, when the final text of the rule was published, the ban on proprietary trading had also been watered down to allow exemptions for underwriting, market-making and risk-mitigating hedging. In January 2014, in the face of a lawsuit, the regulators agreed to let small banks hold some types of collateralized loan obligations.

沃尔克规则——随着篇幅从一页纸增加到六百多页,其意义反而逐渐减弱——只是美国雄心勃勃的金融监管体系改革计划的一部分,而该计划的核心是华尔街。《改革与消费者保护法案》(又称《多德-弗兰克法案》,以其国会提案人克里斯·多德和巴尼·弗兰克的名字命名)于2010年7月21日由奥巴马总统签署成为法律。该法案的正式宗旨是“通过提高金融体系的问责制和透明度来促进美国的金融稳定,终结‘大到不能倒’的金融机构,通过终止救助来保护美国纳税人,并保护消费者免受滥用金融服务行为的侵害”。然而,《多德-弗兰克法案》几乎完美地诠释了监管过度复杂化的弊端。该法案要求监管机构制定243项规则,开展67项研究,并发布22份定期报告。它撤销了一个监管机构,却又新增了两个。据估计,到2014年,与《多德-弗兰克法案》相关的新增限制总数(27,669项)超过了奥巴马政府时期所有其他立法所产生的限制总数。 14 没有什么比这更能体现危机后盲目追求复杂性了。 15

The Volcker Rule – which grew less meaningful as it grew in size from a single page to more than six hundred – was only a part of an ambitious effort to change the system of financial regulation in the United States, the centrepiece of which was the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, known as Dodd-Frank after its congressional sponsors Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, and signed into law by President Obama on 21 July 2010. Formally intended to ‘promote the financial stability of the United States by improving accountability and transparency in the financial system, to end “too big to fail” [institutions], to protect the American taxpayer by ending bailouts [and] to protect consumers from abusive financial services practices’, Dodd-Frank was a near-perfect example of excessive complexity in regulation. The Act required that regulators create 243 rules, conduct 67 studies and issue 22 periodic reports. It eliminated one regulator and created two new ones. By 2014, according to one estimate, the total number of new restrictions associated with Dodd-Frank (27,669) exceeded the restrictions generated by all the other legislation passed under the Obama administration.14 Nothing better illustrates the post-crisis flight into complexity.15

《多德-弗兰克法案》第二章用了近八十页的篇幅,详细阐述了如何以比雷曼兄弟破产造成的破坏更小的程度来清算一家系统重要性金融机构(SIFI)。本质上,该法案将最终责任转移给了财政部长、联邦存款保险公司(FDIC)、哥伦比亚特区地方法院和哥伦比亚特区上诉法院。如果财政部长和FDIC一致认为一家金融机构的倒闭可能导致普遍的不稳定,他们可以接管该机构。如果该机构提出异议,华盛顿的法院有一天的时间来裁定该决定是否正确。泄露此类案件正在审理属于刑事犯罪。假设法院裁定当局胜诉,则SIFI的清算方式为:将其置于FDIC的监管之下,通过向SIFI的债权人征收税款来收回财政部的成本,并根据强制性的“生前遗嘱”进行清算。此程序仅适用于系统重要性金融机构(SIFI)的顶层控股公司;为维持财务稳定,各子公司应照常运营。联邦存款保险公司(FDIC)设立一家“过渡公司”,其资产和负债与SIFI对其子公司的投资和负债相等。SIFI无担保债权人的债权将通过以下方式得到清偿:从过渡公司中分离出来的公司发行新证券。这一程序在实践中究竟能发挥多大作用,很难说。16如果多德-弗兰克法案当时已经存在,2008年9月的事件会如何发展?可以推测,如果这种“有序清算”适用于雷曼兄弟,那么它也适用于美国国际集团(AIG),或许也适用于当时其他一些获得救助的机构。还要注意的是,多德-弗兰克法案的另一个重要组成部分限制了美联储进行危机期间那种紧急贷款的权力。有充分的理由认为,多德-弗兰克法案的最终效果可能实际上是加剧银行业危机,而不是像美联储在2008-2009年所做的那样控制危机。17

Title II of Dodd-Frank spends nearly eighty pages setting out in minute detail how a Systemically Important Financial Institution (SIFI) could be wound up with less disruption than the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers caused. In essence, the legislation transfers ultimate responsibility to the Treasury Secretary, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the District of Columbia district court and the DC court of appeals. If the Treasury Secretary and the FDIC agree that a financial firm’s failure could cause general instability, they can seize control of it. If the firm objects, the courts in Washington have one day to decide if the decision was correct. It is a criminal offense to disclose that such a case is being heard. Assuming the court rules in the authorities’ favour, the SIFI is then resolved by placing it into receivership under the FDIC’s authority, recouping costs to the Treasury through assessments on the SIFI’s creditors, and winding it down according to a mandatory ‘living will’. This procedure applies only to the SIFI’s top-level holding company; subsidiaries are expected to continue business as usual in order to maintain financial stability. The FDIC establishes a ‘bridge company’ with assets and liabilities equal to the SIFI’s investments in, and liabilities to, its subsidiaries. The claims of unsecured creditors on the SIFI are satisfied by the issuance of new securities by the companies that emerge from the bridge company. How far this procedure would work in practice is very hard to say.16 How would the events of September 2008 have unfolded if Dodd-Frank had existed then? Presumably if such an ‘orderly liquidation’ had been applied in the case of Lehman Brothers, it would also have been applicable to AIG and perhaps other institutions that were simply bailed out at that time. Note also that another important component of Dodd-Frank limits the Fed’s power to engage in the kind of emergency lending that took place in the crisis. There is good reason to think that the net effect of Dodd-Frank might actually be to intensify a banking crisis rather than to contain it, as the Fed did in 2008–9.17

无论设计是否合理,金融危机以来出台的大多数新规都集中在银行身上,尤其是要求银行增加资本并降低其面临的风险。金融市场并未因此认为银行比以前更安全;相反,投资者似乎认为新规反而使银行更容易受到冲击。 18如果说2008年的核心问题是某些银行“大到不能倒”,那么这个问题是否已经消失,目前尚存疑问。19 如今,美国前五大银行控制着约47%的银行业资产,而2007年这一比例44%。2011年11月,巴塞尔监管机构公布了全球29家被列为系统重要性金融机构(SIFI)的名单。这些机构的总资产达46万亿美元,略高于全球金融资产总额的五分之一。至于在危机中发挥关键作用的全球影子银行体系,其规模目前估计约为45万亿美元,控制着全球13%的金融资产,而2010年这一数字为28万亿美元。20

Whether well designed or not, most of the new regulations introduced since the financial crisis are focused on banks, and in particular the need to increase their capital and reduce the risks they run. It cannot be claimed that financial markets regard banks as any safer than they were before; on the contrary, investors seem to infer that the new regulations have made them more rather than less vulnerable to adversity.18 If a central problem in 2008 was that certain banks were ‘too big to fail’, it seems doubtful that this problem has gone away.19 America’s top five banks today control around 47 per cent of banking assets, compared with 44 per cent in 2007. In November 2011 the regulators in Basel published a list of the twenty-nine financial institutions around the world they classified as SIFIs. These held total assets of $46 trillion, just over a fifth of all financial assets worldwide. As for the global shadow banking sector, which was so crucial in the crisis, it is now estimated to be around $45 trillion in size, controlling 13 per cent of the world’s financial assets, compared with $28 trillion in 2010.20

然而,正如我们所见,银行只是导致危机的六大原因之一。引人注目的是,在改变金融体系其他组成部分的运作方式方面,所采取的措施却少得多。以信用评级机构为例。诚然,《巴塞尔协议III》要求银行出具内部信用评估报告,而不仅仅依赖评级机构的认可。与此同时,《多德-弗兰克法案》要求美国证券交易委员会设立一个新的机构。信用评级办公室负责监管各评级机构。然而,在实践中,如今的评级体系——例如,对抵押贷款证券(CLO)的评级——与十年前基本相同。市场仍然由少数几家机构主导:穆迪、惠誉和标准普尔。穆迪的“多元化评分”(用于评估CLO结构中信用相关性的指标)仍在沿用。但当穆迪在2008年至2012年间收紧对商业抵押贷款支持证券(CMBS)的评级标准时,它便不再被要求对新发行的低等级债券进行评级。与危机前一样,评级机构之间的竞争导致了评级标准的降低。因此,像Kroll Bond Ratings这样的新机构的加入,可能会使不良债务更容易获得良好的评级。

Yet, as we have seen, banks were only one of six causes of the crisis. Strikingly, much less has been done to alter the operation of the other components of the financial system.21 Take credit rating agencies. It is true that Basel III requires banks to produce internal credit opinions rather than just relying on the agencies’ seal of approval. At the same time, Dodd-Frank requires the Securities and Exchange Commission to set up a new Office of Credit Ratings to supervise the agencies. Yet in practice the system today – for example, for rating collateralized loan obligations – is essentially the same as it was ten years ago. The market is still dominated by a handful of players: Moody’s, Fitch, Standard & Poor’s. Moody’s ‘diversity score’ – an estimate of credit correlation in the structure of a CLO – continues to be used. But when Moody’s tightened its rating standards for commercial mortgage-backed securities in the years 2008–12, it ceased to be asked to rate the lower-grade tranches of new issues. As before the crisis, competition between rating agencies leads to a lowering of standards. The entry of new players such as Kroll Bond Ratings may therefore make it easier to get good ratings for bad debts.

经历了危机十年的摸索之后,货币政策也尚未形成新的稳定范式。美联储现在是否应该收紧政策,以便在下一次经济衰退前留出回旋余地?或者这样做反而会加速下一次衰退?美联储是否需要更高的通胀目标?名义GDP目标?22临时价格水平目标(如本·伯南克所建议的)?23更广泛地说,人们是否仍然普遍支持央行独立性?在危机期间,央行或许一度是“唯一的选择”,但如今它们是否比以往更难实现“宏观审慎”的稳定目标?24货币经济学家是否需要重新思考私人发行的安全资产(例如短期债务,如买卖协议)的作用?如今,这些资产在金融体系中扮演的角色远比20世纪中期重要得多,当时受保险的活期存款才是货币供应的主要组成部分。25

After the improvisations of the crisis decade, monetary policy can also not be said to have arrived at a new and stable paradigm. Should the Fed tighten policy now, in order to create room for maneuver ahead of the next downturn, or does it risk precipitating the next downturn by doing so? Does the Fed need a higher inflation target? A nominal GDP target?22 A temporary price level target (as suggested by Ben Bernanke)?23 More broadly, is there still a consensus in favour of central bank independence? It may have been true at times during the crisis that central banks were ‘the only game in town’, but are they now less able than before to pursue goals of ‘macroprudential’ stability?24 And do monetary economists need to rethink the role of privately produced safe assets (short-term debt such as sale and repurchase agreements), which today play a much bigger role in the financial system than they did in the mid-twentieth century, when insured demand deposits were the main component of the money supply.25

保险领域,尤其是信用违约互换等具有金融保险特征的衍生品市场,变化相对较小。诚然,在监管压力下,中央清算所的作用日益增强,但场外衍生品市场规模仍然远大于中央清算所。另一方面,一些互换的“期货化”(即重组)将金融工具作为期货使用,似乎是为了规避衍生品在报告和保证金方面的新限制。更广泛的保险市场的一个重要转变是欧洲引入了所谓的偿付能力II标准——实际上是针对保险公司的巴塞尔协议III——该标准与美国的监管体系存在显著差异。然而,过去十年来的低利率给保险公司带来了前所未有的压力,迫使它们加大投资力度,或将精算假设调整到极限。

There has also been relatively little change in the realm of insurance and especially in the market for derivatives such as credit default swaps that have some of the characteristics of financial insurance. True, partly under pressure from regulation, central clearinghouses now play a bigger role, but the over-the-counter derivatives market remains vastly larger. On the other hand, the ‘futurization’ of some swaps – i.e. the restructuring of the instruments as futures – seems intended to circumvent new restrictions on derivatives with respect to reporting and margins. An important shift in the wider insurance market is the introduction in Europe of the so-called Solvency II standards – in effect Basel III for insurers – which differ in significant ways from the American regulatory regime. Yet the low interest rates of the past decade have created unprecedented pressures on insurance companies to invest more aggressively or to bend their actuarial assumptions to breaking point.

美国应对危机最直接的监管措施之一是成立了消费者金融保护局(CFPB),其职责之一是整顿美国抵押贷款市场。毫无疑问,该机构已经做出了一些实质性的改变。《贷款真实披露法》的Z条例收紧了所谓“合格抵押贷款”的监管规则,这些规则此前有利于贷款发起机构,并使缺乏经验的借款人容易受到欺骗性的“诱导性”利率的诱惑。例如,贷款发起机构现在必须“尽最大努力”确定借款人的还款能力,否则将承担法律责任。此举旨在消除危机前次级贷款市场常见的“低文件”或“无文件”贷款。如果以申请美国抵押贷款所需文件的数量来衡量成功,我可以根据个人经验证实,新规取得了巨大成功。

Among the most direct regulatory responses to the crisis in the United States was the creation of a new agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, tasked with – among other things – cleaning up the US mortgage market. The agency has without doubt made some material changes. Regulation Z of the Truth in Lending Act tightens the rules governing so-called qualified mortgage loans, which had previously favoured loan originators and exposed unsophisticated borrowers to deceptive ‘teaser’ rates. For example, loan originators are now required to make a ‘good faith effort’ to determine a borrower’s ability to repay and can be held liable for failing to do so. The aim here was to eliminate the ‘low doc’ or ‘no doc’ loans common in the pre-crisis subprime market. If success is measured by the number of documents that now need to be produced to get a US mortgage, I can confirm from personal experience that the new regulations have been a triumph.

然而,如果不是抵押贷款支持证券市场失控,高风险抵押贷款的违约就不会造成如此巨大的影响。2011年,六个政府机构提出了两项​​新规,旨在限制抵押贷款支持证券市场的未来风险:一是所有证券化为抵押贷款支持证券的抵押贷款必须支付20%的首付;二是“风险自留”要求,即贷款发起机构在证券化后必须承担贷款5%的风险(让他们“利益攸关”)。在住房和城市发展部的压力下,20%的首付规定很快被降低到10%。类似的规则调整也出现在针对合格住宅抵押贷款支持证券的拟议规则中。最初的抵押贷款要求首付20%,最低FICO信用评分660分,以及45%的债务收入比。为什么更高的标准被放弃了呢?原因很简单:如果采用更高的标准,就会降低信用评分较低借款人的信贷获取渠道,并限制新的抵押贷款发放。美国住房领域旧有的政治经济模式——即政策和监管激励房地产杠杆投资——依然根深蒂固。

Yet defaults on risky mortgages would not have had such huge ramifications had not the mortgage-backed securities market spun out of control. In 2011, six government agencies proposed two new rules to limit future risk in MBS markets: a 20 per cent down payment for all mortgages securitized into MBS and a ‘risk-retention’ requirement that would require loan originators to hold 5 per cent of a loan’s risk after securitization (giving them ‘skin in the game’). The 20 per cent down-payment rule was quickly reduced to 10 per cent under pressure from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Similar dilution occurred in the case of proposed rules for qualified residential mortgages, which originally required a 20 per cent down payment and a minimum FICO (credit) score of 660 in addition to a 45 per cent debt-to-income ratio requirement. Why were higher standards discarded? For the simple reason that to have adopted them would have reduced credit access for borrowers without strong credit scores and limited new mortgage loan origination. The old political economy of American housing, whereby policy and regulation incentivize leveraged investment in real estate, is alive and well.

支撑美国现代抵押贷款市场的所谓政府支持企业(GSE)的未来仍悬而未决。自危机以来,房利美和房地美当然不再仅仅是政府支持的机构;它们实际上已成为政府所有,尽管“托管”一词在联邦住房金融局(FHFA)的管辖下是其国有化的委婉说法。是否应该解散它们,以结束政府对抵押贷款市场的干预?反对意见认为,废除它们将使抵押贷款利率上升25至125个基点,因为危机前私人证券化热潮没有复苏的迹象。2014年5月,FHFA局长梅尔·瓦特宣称,扩大住房拥有率是该机构的职责,而GSE应该继续为此做出贡献。不久之后,只需支付 3% 的首付和 580 分的 FICO 信用评分即可获得抵押贷款——这种贷款在危机期间的违约率高达 20%——这种贷款又开始获得批准。

As yet unresolved is the future of the so-called government-sponsored enterprises that have underpinned the US mortgage market in modern times. Since the crisis, Fannie and Freddie have of course ceased to be merely government sponsored; they are in effect government owned, even if ‘conservatorship’ under the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) was the preferred euphemism for their nationalization. Should they be wound up, to put an end to government intervention in the mortgage market? The counter-argument is that their abolition would raise mortgage rates by between 25 and 125 basis points, as the pre-crisis craze for private-label securitization shows no sign of reviving. In May 2014, FHFA Director Mel Watt declared that it was his agency’s job to expand home ownership and that the GSEs should continue to help in that endeavour. It was not long before mortgages with just a 3 per cent down payment and 580 FICO score – the type that had a 20 per cent default rate during the crisis – were being approved again.

危机引发的大规模监管行动的核心问题在于,尽管新的监管措施对于避免未来金融危机或许是合理的,但如果其短期效应阻碍了经济复苏,那么这些措施就完全不合理。那些担忧长期停滞的人坚称,唯一真正的解决办法是更多的财政刺激——只要不是共和党人所支持的那种会降低企业税收的刺激措施。他们断然否定了这样一种观点:危机后复苏的缓慢可能与不断扩张的行政机构给企业施加的过度且日益增长的负担有关。26

The core problem of the huge regulatory effort ushered in by the crisis was that, however sensible new regulations might be to avert a future financial crisis, they were not sensible at all if their short-run effect was to hamper recovery. Those who feared secular stagnation were adamant that the only real remedy was more fiscal stimulus – as long as it was not the kind Republicans favoured, which would have reduced taxes on business. They dismissed out of hand the suggestion that the sluggishness of the post-crisis recovery might be related to the excessive yet growing burdens imposed on businesses by the ever-expanding administrative state.26


如今的国际金融体系与十多年前金融危机爆发前夕的体系相比,究竟有何不同?一个简单的回答方法是考察危机前后全球主要金融市场的规模和结构。美国金融体系相对于整体经济规模是否有所缩减?就就业而言,几乎没有变化。2017年,金融服务业就业人数占非农就业人数的比例为4.3%,而十年前为4.4%。银行的经济重要性是否不如危机前?答案是肯定的:2007年,所有国家的跨境银行负债总额占全球GDP的49%。2017年,这一数字降至33%,与2002年的水平大致相当。所有发行人的国际债务证券占全球产出的比例也略有下降,从32%降至30%。然而,全球公共债务占全球GDP的比重从2007年的50%上升至2017年的77%,这反映了危机对世界各地财政政策的影响。股市总市值也高于危机前水平:2017年为55%,而危机前为52%。最后,衍生品的情况如何?在交易所交易的期权和期货名义本金占全球GDP的比重已从136%下降至101%。场外衍生品未偿付名义金额占全球产出的比重也同样下降。然而,尽管监管机构做出了努力,场外衍生品的交易量仍然远远超过交易所的交易量。

How different is the international financial system today from the system as it was on the eve of the financial crisis, just over a decade ago? One simple way of answering that question is simply to look at the scale and structure of the world’s principal financial markets, before and after. Has the United States financial system shrunk relative to the economy as a whole? In terms of employment, barely. Employment in financial services as a percentage of non-farm employment was 4.3 per cent in 2017, compared with 4.4 per cent ten years before. Are banks less economically significant than they were before the crisis? Yes: total cross-border bank liabilities for all countries were 49 per cent of world GDP in 2007. In 2017 the figure was 33 per cent, roughly where it was in 2002. International debt securities for all issuers are also down modestly relative to global output, from 32 per cent to 30 per cent. However, global public debt has risen, from 50 per cent of global GDP in 2007 to 77 per cent in 2017, reflecting the impact of the crisis on fiscal policies around the world. Stock market capitalization is also higher than it was before the crisis: it was 55 per cent in 2017, compared with 52 per cent in the pre-crisis year. Finally, what of derivatives? The notional principal of options and futures traded on organized exchanges has fallen as a share of world GDP from 136 per cent to 101 per cent. So too, relative to world output, has the notional amount outstanding of over-the-counter derivatives. However, despite the efforts of regulators, the volume of OTC derivatives still vastly exceeds the volume traded on exchanges.

换句话说,金融体系发生了变化,但变化之大,还不足以称之为根本性的改变。正如我们将看到的,该体系中出现了一些重要的创新——这些变化并未体现在本文讨论的数据中——但监管机构并不能真正将这些创新归功于自己。一如既往,金融创新往往发生在监管较少或缺乏监管的领域——最明显的例子就是所谓的加密货币,例如比特币。基于区块链的货币也可能……这是一项重要的创新。然而,相对于现有的金融体系而言,它仍然微不足道:2017年加密货币的总市值仅占世界GDP的0.7%。

Planet Finance has changed, in other words, but not so much that one could claim that it was fundamentally different. As we shall see, there have been some significant innovations in the system – changes not captured in the data discussed here – but regulators cannot really claim credit for these. As usual, financial innovation has tended to occur where there has been little or no regulation – most obviously in the case of so-called cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Blockchain-based money is potentially an important novelty. However, it remains little more than a rounding error relative to the established financial system: total cryptocurrency market capitalization in 2017 was just 0.7 per cent of world GDP.

注:* 2002 年的数据实际上是 2005 年的数据。** 2017 年的数据实际上是 2015 年的数据。

Notes: * 2002 figure is in fact 2005. ** 2017 figure is in fact 2015.

资料来源:美国劳工统计局;国际清算银行;国际货币基金组织。

Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics; Bank for International Settlements; International Monetary Fund.

反弹

Backlash

金融危机之后出现政治反弹并不难预料。“必将流血,”我在2009年2月接受采访时说,“因为如此规模的危机必然会加剧政治和经济冲突。它必然会使一些国家动荡不安。它将导致那些一直处于休眠状态的内战爆发。它将……”推翻温和派政府,扶植极端派政府。这些事情是可以预见的。27还假设一些政府——特别是俄罗斯政府——可能会诉诸对外侵略,尽管我错误地认为,入侵乌克兰的经济代价会阻止弗拉基米尔·普京总统入侵乌克兰。

That there would be a political backlash in the aftermath of the financial crisis was not difficult to foresee. ‘There will be blood,’ I told an interviewer in February 2009, ‘in the sense that a crisis of this magnitude is bound to increase political as well as economic [conflict]. It is bound to destabilize some countries. It will cause civil wars to break out that have been dormant. It will topple governments that were moderate and bring in governments that are extreme. These things are pretty predictable.’27 I also hypothesized that some governments – notably the Russian – might resort to foreign aggression, though I reasoned wrongly that President Vladimir Putin would be deterred from invading Ukraine by the economic costs of doing so.

金融危机确实产生了深远的政治影响。在一些阿拉伯国家——尤其是突尼斯、利比亚、埃及、也门、叙利亚和巴林——爆发了革命,这些革命在2010年底开始时被误称为“阿拉伯之春”。在几乎所有西方民主国家(德国是少数例外),现任政治家都被赶下台,取而代之的是一些更年轻、与金融精英及其所支持的政策关联较少的人物。2014年2月,在基辅爆发大规模抗议活动以及该国腐败总统维克托·亚努科维奇逃亡之后,俄罗斯军队和亲俄分裂分子控制了克里米亚半岛,随后又控制了顿巴斯地区。

The financial crisis did indeed have profound political consequences. In a number of Arab countries – notably Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain – there were revolutions, mistakenly dubbed an ‘Arab Spring’ when they began at the end of 2010. In nearly all Western democracies – Germany was a rare exception – incumbent politicians were displaced, often by younger figures less tainted by association with the financial elite and the policies it had favoured. In February 2014, following mass protests in Kiev and the flight of the country’s corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovych, Russian forces and pro-Russian separatists seized control of the Crimean peninsula and later the Donbass region.

然而,将2008年后的所有政治动荡都简单地解释为金融危机的直接后果,未免过于片面。2016年,英国脱欧公投和美国总统大选的意外结果,令许多自由派记者和学者忧心忡忡地撰文,担忧自由民主正面临一场普遍危机——用斯坦福大学政治学家拉里·戴蒙德的话来说,就是一场“民主衰退”。 28 专栏作家弗兰克·里奇在2018年8月写道:“一片深深的阴霾……在2008年9月降临……”

Yet it would be simplistic to interpret all the political instability of the period after 2008 as a direct consequence of the financial crisis. In 2016, the unexpected results of the British referendum on European Union membership and the US presidential election led many liberal journalists and academics to write fearfully about a general crisis of liberal democracy – a ‘democratic recession,’ in the words of the Stanford political scientist Larry Diamond.28 A ‘deep gloom . . . arrived in September 2008,’ wrote the columnist Frank Rich in August 2018:

雷曼兄弟的倒闭引发了大衰退,这场衰退对美国的生存威胁比七年前的9·11恐怖袭击更为持久。它投下的阴影如此深重,以至于十年后……一个信念……仍然团结着所有美国人:这个国家的一切都崩溃了……与引发铺天盖地的相互指责和调查的9·11事件不同,大衰退从未带来任何可能有助于恢复这种信心的清算。华尔街的劫匪逍遥法外。惩罚措施也适用于他们赖以生存的大多数银行机构。其他人则不得不承担后果。29

when the collapse of Lehman Brothers kicked off the Great Recession that proved to be a more lasting existential threat to America than the terrorist attack of seven Septembers earlier. The shadow it would cast is so dark that a decade later . . . one conviction . . . still unites all Americans: Everything in the country is broken. . . . Unlike 9/11, which prompted an orgy of recriminations and investigations, the Great Recession never yielded a reckoning that might have helped restore that faith. The Wall Street bandits escaped punishment, as did most of the banking houses where they thrived. Everyone else was stuck with the bill.29

然而,如果金融危机与政治之间的关系真如此简单明了,那么伯尼·桑德斯如今肯定已经是美国总统,杰里米·科尔宾也应该已经是英国首相了。毕竟,正是他们以及与他们类似的左翼政客,明确呼吁将银行家们绳之以法,因为他们在引发危机中扮演了重要角色。“令人愤慨的是,没有一位华尔街高管因导致经济濒临崩溃而入狱,”桑德斯在2015年10月发表的一份声明中说道。“未能起诉华尔街的骗子们的非法和鲁莽行为,是对我们支离破碎的刑事司法系统的公然控诉。” 30这在他次年竞选民主党总统候选人提名时反复出现。然而,最终赢得那场竞选的是希拉里·克林顿——对于那些熟悉克林顿夫妇多年来与华尔街周旋的人来说,希拉里·克林顿为高盛集团泄露的演讲稿以及她收取的费用并不令人意外。31而她最终在总统竞选中败给了唐纳德·J·特朗普。这位候选人在2016年5月的一次采访中吹嘘道:“我和所有主要银行都是朋友。他们都渴望和我做生意。”随后,他任命了多位高盛前员工担任其政府要职,包括财政部长、国家经济委员会主任和首席策略师。32这位自诩为“债务之王”的人似乎不太可能成为金融体系反弹的受益者——这也是为何很少有专业评论员预见到他会获胜的原因之一。

If the relationship between financial crisis and politics were so straightforward, however, surely Bernie Sanders would now be president of the United States, and Jeremy Corbyn prime minister of the United Kingdom. After all, they and left-wing politicians like them were the ones who called explicitly for bankers to be jailed for their role in causing the crisis. ‘It is an outrage that not one major Wall Street executive has gone to jail for causing the near collapse of the economy,’ Sanders said in a statement published in October 2015. ‘The failure to prosecute the crooks on Wall Street for their illegal and reckless behavior is a clear indictment of our broken criminal justice system.’30 This was a recurrent theme of his campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination the following year. Yet it was Hillary Clinton who won that contest – a candidate whose leaked speeches for Goldman Sachs and the fees she received came as no surprise to those familiar with the Clintons’ many years of sweet-talking Wall Street.31 And she in turn was defeated in the presidential race by Donald J. Trump, a candidate who boasted in a May 2016 interview, ‘I am friends with all the major banks. They are dying to do business with me,’ and proceeded to appoint Goldman Sachs alumni to key positions in his administration, including Treasury Secretary, director of the National Economic Council and chief strategist.32 The self-proclaimed ‘king of debt’ had not seemed self-evidently likely to be the beneficiary of a backlash against the financial system – which was one of the reasons so few professional pundits foresaw his victory.

历史有助于解释为什么金融危机对右翼民粹主义者的益处远大于对左翼民粹主义者的益处。“把银行家送进监狱!”这句口号无疑很有吸引力,但将经济困境和失望归咎于移民和外国人似乎是一种更具政治效力的策略。同样,虽然“再次加强对华尔街的监管!”能引起部分选民的共鸣,但“让美国再次伟大”更能引起更多选民的共鸣。历史上有很多这样的例子。自19世纪末全球化浪潮兴起以来,西方世界经历了多次金融危机。在大多数情况下,右翼民粹主义者都是政治上的受益者。33合理的解释似乎是他们论点的心理影响力更大。毕竟,金融危机的主要受害者群体构成复杂:他们并非依赖福利的底层阶级(他们相对而言损失不大),而是面临财务困境或岌岌可危的中产阶级。那些失去房屋或既能带来收入又能赋予社会地位的白领工作的人们,很难接受传统社会主义关于加强政府控制和财政再分配的理念。他们更有可能响应右翼民粹主义者关于限制移民、贸易保护主义或背离货币政策的论点。

History helps explain why the financial crisis was so much more beneficial to right-wing populists than to their left-wing counterparts. ‘Jail the bankers!’ no doubt has its appeal as a slogan, but blaming economic hardships and disappointments on immigrants and foreigners would seem to be a more politically potent strategy. Likewise, while ‘Regulate Wall Street More Tightly Again!’ resonates with some voters, ‘Make America Great Again’ resonates with more. There have been many financial crises in the Western world since the first era of globalization in the late nineteenth century. In most cases, right-wing populists have been the political beneficiaries.33 The best explanation would appear to be the greater psychological power of their arguments. The main losers of a financial crisis are a heterogeneous group, after all: they are not the welfare-dependent underclass, who had relatively little to lose, but the financially exposed or precarious middle class. People who have lost homes they owned or white-collar jobs that conferred status as well as income are not especially receptive to a classical socialist message of increased government control and fiscal redistribution. They are more likely to respond to the right-wing populists’ arguments for immigration restriction, trade protectionism or a departure from monetary orthodoxy.

仔细分析就会发现,民粹主义的反弹不仅催生了英国脱欧和特朗普,还在欧洲催生了六个民粹主义或半民粹主义政府,以及数量是其两倍的成功民粹主义政党。这不仅是金融危机本身的结果,也是移民增加和不平等加剧(或人们对不平等加剧的感知)的结果;而且,文化因素的影响甚至超过了经济因素。以美国为例,外来务工人员在人口中所占比例的上升、收入最高的1%家庭收入比例的增加、经通胀调整后的平均家庭收入停滞不前以及黄金年龄段男性劳动力参与率的下降,这些趋势——如同中年非西班牙裔白人死亡率的惊人上升——都可以追溯到千禧年之交。金融危机或许是民众反抗政治建制的催化剂,但它绝非这场“大反抗”的唯一原因。这有助于解释一个明显的悖论:这场革命的主要政治受益者——英国脱欧派和特朗普的经济团队——都是金融放松管制的支持者。

On closer inspection, the populist backlash that produced not only Brexit and Trump but also six populist or partly populist governments in Europe and twice that number of successful populist parties was the result as much of increased immigration and increased inequality (or the perception of increased inequality) as it was of the financial crisis per se; and even more the result of cultural factors than economic ones. In the case of the United States, the rise in the share of foreign-born workers in the population, the increase in the proportion of income going to the top 1 per cent of households, the stagnation of the average household’s inflation-adjusted income and the decline of prime-age male participation in the labour force were all trends – like the shocking increase in mortality rates for middle-aged non-Hispanic whites – that dated back to the turn of the millennium. The financial crisis may have acted as a catalyst for popular revulsion against the political establishment, but it was by no means the sole cause of the ‘great revolt’. This helps explain the apparent paradox that the principal political beneficiaries of this revolt – the Brexiteers and the Trump economics team – were proponents of financial deregulation.

正如萨琳娜·齐托所观察到的,媒体对唐纳德·特朗普的言论信以为真,但并未认真对待;而关键的中西部摇摆州的选民则认真对待他,但并未完全按照字面意思理解。 34 然而,特朗普的信息对选民而言,特朗普的言论既值得认真对待,也值得字面解读。在他的就职演说中,如同在许多竞选演讲中一样,特朗普将美国经济描绘成一片废墟:“锈迹斑斑的工厂像墓碑一样散落在各地……我们中产阶级的财富已被从家中夺走。”他明确承诺“美国优先”,并宣称:“保护将带来巨大的繁荣和力量。”从此以后,将奉行“两条简单的规则:购买美国货,雇用美国人”。他提出的目标是使经济增长率翻一番,这不仅要通过重新谈判有利于美国的贸易协定来实现,还要通过税制改革和放松管制来实现——这正是共和党建制派的首要任务,他们勉强同意了他的候选资格。这种民粹主义和保守主义的混合体,再加上特朗普夸张的个性和惯于撒谎的性格,使经济学界陷入了恐慌。在特朗普胜选当晚午夜刚过,保罗·克鲁格曼写道:“现在看来,唐纳德·J·特朗普总统确实胜选了,而市场正在暴跌……如果问题是市场何时才能复苏,初步答案是永远不会……因此,我们很可能正面临一场看不到尽头的全球衰退。” 35 然而,就在当天上午晚些时候,市场实际上已经反弹至危机后的新高。截至本文撰写之时,克鲁格曼预测的全球衰退仍未出现任何迹象。事实上,有充分的证据表明经济过热——至少在美国劳动力市场是如此——以至于即使是不那么危言耸听的“长期停滞”论调似乎也再次被现实所否定。国际货币基金组织在 2018 年 7 月预测全球经济将出现停滞,当时预测 2018 年和 2019 年全球经济增长率为 3.9%,高于 1980 年至 2016 年 3.5% 的平均水平,而实际情况肯定并非如此。

As Salena Zito observed, the media took Donald Trump literally, but not seriously; voters in the key Middle American swing states took him seriously, but not literally.34 Yet Trump’s message to voters was worth taking both seriously and literally. In his inaugural address, as in many campaign speeches, Trump depicted the US economy as a scene of devastation: ‘Rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape. . . . The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes.’ He explicitly pledged to put ‘America First’ and declared: ‘Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.’ Henceforth, there would be ‘Two simple rules: Buy American and hire American.’ His stated goal was to double the growth rate of the economy not just by renegotiating trade agreements to the advantage of the United States but also through tax reform and deregulation – the top priorities of the Republican establishment, which had reluctantly acquiesced in his candidacy. This cocktail of populism and conservatism, in combination with Trump’s supersized personality and compulsive mendacity, threw much of the economics profession into a hysterical state. Shortly after midnight on the night of Trump’s victory, Paul Krugman wrote: ‘It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging . . . If the question is when the markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never . . . So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight.’35 The market had in fact rallied to a new post-crisis high by later that same morning. There is, at the time of writing, still no sign of the global recession Krugman predicted. Indeed, there is sufficient evidence of economic overheating – at least, in the US labour market – that even the less alarmist notion of secular stagnation seems once again to have been disproved by events. Stagnation is certainly not what the IMF was forecasting in July 2018, when it projected global growth of 3.9 per cent in 2018 and 2019, above the 1980–2016 average of 3.5 per cent.

克鲁格曼错在哪里?部分原因是,一个政府如果同时放松对企业的监管并增加财政赤字(部分是通过减轻企业税负,部分是通过增加国防开支),那么它很可能实现经济增长。(或许如果上届政府也采取同样的措施,经济复苏会更快。)特朗普不仅承诺放松金融管制,而且还兑现了承诺,进一步放宽了沃尔克规则,降低了中型银行的资本要求,并任命反对《多德-弗兰克法案》的米克·穆​​尔瓦尼掌管消费者金融保护局。36部分原因是,世界主要经济体(日本除外)自2016年春季前后就已开始出现经济活动回升的迹象。然而,仅凭这一框架来理解金融危机十年后的全球经济状况未免过于狭隘。

Why was Krugman so wrong? Part of the answer is that an administration that simultaneously reduced regulation on business and increased the fiscal deficit, partly by cutting the tax burden on corporations and partly by increasing defence expenditure, was always quite likely to achieve an increase in economic growth. (Perhaps if the previous administration had done those same things, there would have been a faster recovery.) Trump not only promised financial deregulation; he delivered it, further relaxing the Volcker Rule, easing capital requirements for medium-sized banks, and putting Mick Mulvaney – an opponent of Dodd-Frank – in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.36 Part of the answer is that the world’s largest economies (with the exception of Japan) were already experiencing an uptick in economic activity from around the spring of 2016. Yet this is too narrow a framework within which to understand the global economy ten years after the financial crisis.

在许多方面,世界正处于一个转折点,这一转折点与金融市场的短期行为以及那些试图影响金融市场的政客们无关。首先,长期的人口结构变化预示着一个通胀加剧的世界。全球劳动者与消费者的比例已经达到峰值,结束了从20世纪80年代到21世纪初至关重要的廉价劳动力过剩局面。仅中国一国,到本世纪末就将减少超过4亿劳动力。 37根据联合国的预测,到2030年左右,全球65岁及以上人口将超过15至24岁人口。除非洲以外,到2100年,世界所有地区的15至24岁人口占比都将低于12%。如果老年人的健康状况和就业前景没有显著改善,人口抚养比势必会持续上升。这些预测所暗示的长期劳动力市场紧张状况,使得许多经济学家预期工资将会上涨。与此同时,随着人口老龄化,储蓄往往会下降,因为大多数福利和医疗保健体系鼓励人们在生命最后阶段进行高额的医疗保健消费。38

In a number of respects, the world is at an inflection point that is divorced from the short-run behaviour of financial markets and the politicians who pretend to influence them. First, long-run demographic changes are pointing towards a more inflationary world. The global ratio of workers to consumers has peaked, bringing to an end the glut of cheap labour that was so crucial from the 1980s until the 2000s. China alone is poised to lose more than 400 million workers between now and the end of this century.37 By around 2030, according to United Nations projections, the world’s population aged 65 and older will exceed the population aged between 15 and 24. In every region in the world except Africa, that youthful age group will account for less than 12 per cent of the population by 2100. Dependency ratios are poised to rise steadily in the absence of significant changes in the health and employment prospects of the elderly. The long-run labour market tightness implied by these projections leads many economists to expect rising wages. At the same time, as populations age, savings tend to fall, as most welfare and health care systems encourage high health care consumption in the final phase of life.38

央行官员经常以短期和长期通胀压力为由,结束过去十年非常规货币政策。美联储已承诺逐步大幅缩减资产负债表规模,并分阶段实现联邦基金利率正常化。主要发达国家央行的总资产预计将在……达到峰值。2018年底,全球经济进入“量化紧缩”时代,尽管每月债券购买规模的缩减已经开始。全球信贷增长已经放缓,这主要是由于2016年和2017年中国信贷新增规模的减少。与此同时,有理由认为始于20世纪80年代并持续到2016年的债券牛市已经结束。美国10年期国债收益率在2016年7月触及1.32%的历史低点。截至撰写本文时(2018年8月),该收益率徘徊在3%附近。

Short-run and long-run inflationary pressures are frequently cited by central bankers as a justification for ending the unconventional monetary policies of the past ten years. The Federal Reserve has committed itself to a gradual but significant reduction in the size of its balance sheet as well as to the step-wise ‘normalization’ of the federal funds rate. The total assets of the principal developed world central banks are expected to peak by the end of 2018, ushering in the era of ‘quantitative tightening’, though the tapering of monthly bond purchases has already commenced. World credit growth is already slowing, mainly because of a reduction in Chinese credit creation in 2016 and 2017. At the same time, there is reason to think the great bond bull market that began in the 1980s and continued until 2016 has finally come to an end. The yield on the US ten-year Treasury reached an historic low of 1.32 per cent in July 2016. At the time of writing (August 2018) it is hovering close to 3 per cent.

一个关键问题是通胀能否达到预期。大多数经济学家认为,历史上的“菲利普斯曲线”至少在一定程度上仍然有效,这意味着劳动力市场趋紧会导致工资和物价上涨。然而,他们可能低估了计算机技术(尤其是人工智能)对熟练和非熟练劳动力需求以及劳动者预期的影响。以金融从业人员为例,根据世界银行的数据,至少有80%的概率实现“计算机化”。 39如果工资通胀未能如模型预测的那样出现,那么未来借款人的实际利率可能会上升。如果真是如此,那么过度杠杆化的经济体将面临金融寒冬。国际清算银行的克劳迪奥·博里奥在2017年的一次演讲中特别指出,如果利率上升,中国、加拿大和土耳其等经济体的国内银行体系可能会面临压力。40事实证明,他对土耳其的判断是正确的,土耳其货币在 2018 年前三个季度贬值了 50%。

A crucial question is whether inflation will meet or miss expectations. Most economists assume that the historic ‘Phillips curve’ retains at least some validity, meaning that a tightening labour market should lead to rising wages and prices. Yet the possibility exists that they are underestimating the effects of computer technology – especially artificial intelligence – on the demand for skilled as well as unskilled labour, as well as on the expectations of workers. Finance professional – to give just one example – is among numerous occupations with at least an 80 per cent probability of being ‘computerized’, according to the World Bank.39 If wage inflation does not materialize as the models predict, then the future may be one of rising real rates for borrowers. If so, then a financial winter is coming for over-leveraged economies. In a 2017 speech, Claudio Borio of the Bank for International Settlements singled out China, Canada and Turkey as economies likely to see strains in their domestic banking systems in the event of rising rates.40 He has already been proven right about Turkey, which suffered a 50 per cent currency depreciation in the first three quarters of 2018.

然而,即使是美国,如果利率上升速度超过通胀率,也会遭受损失,这主要是因为联邦债务增长迅速且平均期限相对较短。国会预算办公室在其2018年的长期预测中预计,假设通胀率稳定在2.4%,长期利率从3.0%上升至4.8%,那么公共部门持有的联邦债务将从2018年的78%上升到2048年的150%以上。在这种情况下,净利息支出将……到2046年,联邦债务将几乎翻两番,从占GDP的1.6%增至6.3%。41避免痛苦的财政紧缩的唯一途径是阻止实际利率上升。中央银行成立于17世纪,旨在帮助政府管理债务,在近代,它们也常常扮演着这一角色。或许,未来货币政策的任务将是维持接近于零的实际利率,同时应对日益庞大的公共债务。如果真是如此,那么日本将再次成为其他发达国家的试验场。反之,如果世界各国货币当局试图恢复到危机前的正常状态,将政策利率维持在远高于零的水平,即便民粹主义政府不断扩大财政赤字,那么下一次金融危机可能源于实际利率上升和美元走强带来的意想不到的后果。 42截至撰写本文时,甚至有理由认为,下一次危机已经在新兴市场悄然萌芽。

However, even the United States will experience pain if rates rise ahead of inflation, not least because of the rapid growth and relatively short average maturity of the federal debt. In its 2018 long-run projections, the Congressional Budget Office anticipated that the federal debt in public hands would rise from 78 per cent in 2018 to above 150 per cent by 2048, assuming steady 2.4 per cent inflation and long-term interest rates rising from 3.0 to 4.8 per cent. In this scenario, net interest payments on the federal debt would nearly quadruple from 1.6 per cent of GDP to 6.3 per cent of GDP by 2046.41 The only way of avoiding a painful fiscal squeeze would be if real interest rates could be prevented from rising. Central banks were created in the seventeenth century to help governments with debt management, and they have often performed that role in more recent times. Perhaps the future task of monetary policy will be the maintenance of a near-zero real rate on ever larger mountains of public debt. If so, then Japan will once again have acted as an experimental laboratory for the rest of the developed world. If not – if the world’s monetary authorities seek to return to pre-crisis normality, with policy rates substantially above zero, even as populist governments ramp up fiscal deficits – the next financial crisis could arise from the unintended consequences of rising real interest rates and a strengthening dollar.42 At the time of writing there is even reason to think the next crisis has already begun in emerging markets.

奇美利加的终结

The End of Chimerica

如果没有美联储,金融危机将会更加严重。如果没有中国的刺激措施,全球经济放缓的持续时间将会更长。如果没有欧洲的犹豫不决和美国的监管,经济复苏将会更快。危机发源地美国所面临的后果是矛盾的。民众对金融和政治精英无能的政治反弹,最终没有催生出桑德斯,而是特朗普。在欧洲,危机反而增强了右翼民粹主义者的势力,而非左翼民粹主义者。原本贫困的希腊可能会选择退出欧元区(这或许在经济上更有意义),但繁荣的英国却投票决定脱离欧盟,导致自身经济实力下降。然而,这些并非金融危机最严重的后果。

The financial crisis would have been worse but for the Federal Reserve. The global slowdown would have been longer but for China’s stimulus. The recovery would have been faster but for European indecision and American regulation. The consequences for the United States, where the crisis had originated, were paradoxical. The political backlash against the incompetence of the financial and political elites produced not Sanders but Trump. In Europe it empowered the populists of the right more than the populists of the left. Instead of an impoverished Greece leaving the Eurozone, which might have made some economic sense, a prospering Britain voted to leave the European Union, which made less. Yet these were not the most significant consequences of the financial crisis.

奇美利加是这场危机的关键原因之一。它在危机中幸存下来,并为克服危机做出了巨大贡献。然而,中美经济的成功本质上是不对称的。2001年中国加入世界贸易组织时,其国内生产总值(按现价美元计算)仅占美国GDP的13%。到2016年,这一比例上升至60%,而根据国际货币基金组织的最新预测,到2023年,这一比例将达到88%。考虑到中美两国购买力的差异,自2014年以来,中国经济实际上一直是全球最大的经济体。正如我们所见,金融危机一度看似中美经济走向终结的开端;然而,事实证明,中美关系对于避免经济全面衰退至关重要。2017年,中美经济(中华人民共和国加上美国)约占世界GDP的五分之二。中国约占美国贸易逆差总额的一半。尽管2015年出现了大量资本外流,中国仍持有超过3万亿美元的外汇储备,其中大部分是美元。中美关系远非一种不切实际的幻想,反而似乎已经成为一种稳定的共生关系。

Chimerica had been a key cause of the crisis. It had survived the crisis and contributed substantially to overcoming it. Yet the success of Chimerica was fundamentally asymmetrical. When China had been admitted to the World Trade Organization in 2001, its gross domestic product had been just 13 per cent of US GDP on a current-dollar basis. By 2016 it was 60 per cent, and by 2023 – according to the most recent International Monetary Fund projections – it will hit 88 per cent. Adjusted for differences in purchasing power between the United States and China, the Chinese economy has in fact been the largest in the world since 2014. As we have seen, the financial crisis had looked like the beginning of the end for Chimerica; instead, the Chinese-American relationship proved crucial in avoiding a full-blown depression. In 2017 Chimerica – the People’s Republic plus the United States – made up around two fifths of world GDP. China accounted for around half of the total US trade deficit. Despite significant capital outflows in 2015, China still held more than $3 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves, the bulk held in US dollars. Far from being a chimera, Chimerica appeared to have become a stable symbiosis.

然而,2017年的中美关系与2007年已截然不同。危机前时期普遍存在的经常账户失衡现象已显著缓解。这是为什么呢?首先,中国发生了变化。净出口不再是经济增长的主要驱动力。在许多方面,中国越来越像美国,家庭消费不断增长,工资水平更高,金融体系也更加复杂,包括消费债务、影子银行和其他表外实体(例如“财富管理产品”),以及巨额的总体债务负担。然而,更大的变化发生在美国。唐纳德·特朗普当选总统后——他在2016年竞选期间曾多次批评中国的贸易政策——美国领导层的反华立场发生了强烈的转变。特朗普政府于2017年12月发布的《国家安全战略》措辞比之前的版本更加强硬,明确将中国列为“战略竞争对手”。从 2018 年初开始,新政府宣布对中国商品加征一系列关税。

Yet the Chimerica of 2017 was significantly different from its 2007 version. The current account imbalances that had characterized the pre-crisis period were significantly diminished. Why was this? For one thing, China had changed. Net exports were no longer the key driver of economic growth. In many ways, it increasingly resembled the United States, with rising household consumption, higher wages, and a complex financial system that featured consumer debt, shadow banks and other off-balance-sheet entities (such as ‘wealth-management products’), and a very large aggregate debt burden. The bigger change, however, was in the United States. After the election of Donald Trump – who had repeatedly criticized China’s trade policies in his 2016 campaign – American leadership took a strongly anti-Chinese turn. The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, published in December 2017 and couched in more combative language than its predecessor, explicitly identified China as a ‘strategic competitor’. Beginning in early 2018, the new administration announced a succession of tariffs on Chinese goods.

崇尚自由贸易的经济学家们的传统观点支持自由国际秩序的政治学家认为,特朗普是破坏性的新兴力量,正在危及数十年的中美伙伴关系。然而,更合理的解释可能是因果关系恰恰相反。中美关系的分歧始于2015年,当时,由于人民币贬值失误导致资本外逃激增,北京采取了一系列防御措施,以降低其体系内日益增长的金融风险。这些措施包括旨在稳定人民币汇率的新汇率目标,以及旨在阻止外汇储备下降的严格资本管制。这些措施产生了深远的全球影响。人民币作为一种受管控货币,其对国际投资者的吸引力下降,导致人民币在2014年至2016年间对美元贬值。这反过来又加剧了中美双边贸易逆差。与此同时,尽管西方专家一再预测即将出现“中国危机”,但中国经济的增长速度仍然远超美国。这些趋势在2016年总统大选中发挥了作用,这一点似乎显而易见。特朗普在推特和演讲中持续不断地“抨击中国”,这为他在受中国外包影响最大的地区赢得了选票。2016年12月发布的一项县级分析发现,来自中国的进口竞争每增加一个百分点,特朗普的支持率相对于之前的共和党总统候选人就会上升2.9%。 43

The conventional view of economists who revere free trade and political scientists who favour a liberal international order is that Trump is the disruptive new force who is jeopardizing decades of Sino-American partnership. Yet it could more plausibly be argued that the direction of causation goes the other way. China and the United States began to diverge in 2015, when – after a bungled currency devaluation led to a surge of capital flight – Beijing took several defensive steps to reduce the growing financial risks within its system. These included new exchange-rate targets designed to stabilize the yuan, as well as stringent capital controls to halt the decline in its foreign-exchange reserves. These measures had far-reaching global effects. The yuan’s status as a managed currency made it less attractive for international investors, contributing to its depreciation against the US dollar from 2014 to 2016. This, in turn, helped widen the US-China bilateral trade deficit. At the same time, despite repeated predictions by Western experts of an imminent ‘China crisis’, the Chinese economy continued to grow significantly faster than that of the United States. That these trends played a role in the 2016 presidential election seems clear. Trump’s consistent ‘China bashing’ in his tweets and speeches won him votes in the areas most affected by outsourcing to China. A county-level analysis published in December 2016 found that a one-point increase in import competition from China was associated with a 2.9 per cent increase in support for Trump relative to earlier Republican presidential candidates.43

对中国的反弹几乎是“中美关系”演变过程中不可避免的结果。即便没有唐纳德·特朗普,这种反弹也会发生——尽管形式或许会更隐晦一些。如果特朗普没有赢得共和党总统候选人提名,另一位共和党总统很可能也会采取类似的行动——例如,参议员马可·卢比奥在2018年对华日益敌对的立场。值得注意的是,这是特朗普少数几个能获得民主党支持的问题之一。民主党在参议院的领袖查克·舒默长期以来一直公开批评中国的贸易行为和所谓的汇率操纵。

The backlash against China was a more or less inevitable consequence of the evolution of Chimerica. It would have happened – though perhaps in a subtler form – even without Donald Trump. Had Trump not won the GOP nomination, another Republican president might well have acted in a similar way – witness Senator Marco Rubio’s increasingly hostile stance toward China in 2018. Note, too, that this is one of the few issues on which Trump enjoys Democratic support. The Democrats’ leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, has long been a vocal critic of Chinese trade practices and alleged currency manipulation.

大多数西方评论员认为特朗普的关税政策是危险的误入歧途,并警告称,如果贸易“战”旷日持久,后果将不堪设想。另一种可能性是,征收惩罚性关税是迫使中国改变其做法的正确途径。根据贸易战的演变,在最温和的情况下,中国出口总额可能在一个月内下降1.2%,而在一年内则可能下降超过4%。中国经济学家徐翔表示,旷日持久的贸易战可能使中国GDP年增长率下降高达0.4%。 44相比之下,美国受到的影响要小得多。美国从中国的进口额约占中国GDP的4%,而美国对中国的出口额不到美国GDP的1%。随着特朗普政府在2018年提高对中国制造商品的关税,中国越来越难以制定相应的报复措施。中国原本希望欧盟和其他主要贸易经济体能够站在北京一边对抗华盛顿,但这一希望落空了。无论欧洲商界领袖对特朗普的个性和言论有何看法,他们都有充分的理由同情他对中国做法的批评。同样,中国也误判了形势,认为精心策划的报复性关税——用一位中国官员的话来说就是“针灸”——会疏远共和党的关键选民群体。事实证明,那些因贸易战而受损的选民原本就对中国抱有敌意,因此不会将他们的痛苦归咎于特朗普政府。45

Most Western commentators regard Trump’s tariffs as dangerously misguided, warning of dire consequences if there is a protracted trade ‘war’. The alternative possibility is that the imposition of punitive tariffs is the right way to force China to change its ways. Depending on how a trade war evolves, it could cut China’s total exports by between 1.2 per cent in a month, in the mildest scenario, and more than 4 per cent in a year. According to Chinese economist Xu Xiang, a prolonged trade war could reduce China’s GDP growth by up to 0.4 per cent a year.44 The United States, by contrast, is much less vulnerable. American imports from China are equivalent to around 4 per cent of China’s GDP. American exports to China are less than 1 per cent of US GDP. As the Trump administration raised tariffs on Chinese-manufactured goods in the course of 2018, it became steadily harder for China to devise commensurate retaliation. Chinese hopes that the European Union and other major trading economies might side with Beijing against Washington were disappointed. Whatever their feelings about Trump’s personality and rhetoric, European business leaders had good reason to sympathize with his critique of Chinese practices. Likewise, the Chinese miscalculated that carefully targeted retaliatory tariffs – ‘acupuncture’, in the words of one Chinese official – would alienate key voter groups from the Republican Party. It turned out that voters hurt by the trade war were already sufficiently hostile to China not to blame the Trump administration for their pain.45

特朗普对华贸易战的最终结果仍有待观察。双方都存在经济脆弱性,但显然中国的脆弱性更大。这场贸易战不仅推迟了中国金融体系不透明问题亟待解决的改革,而且由于危及官方增长目标,迫使中国政府重新采取那些导致其现有金融问题的措施——尤其是举债投资基础设施建设。要知道,这一切正值中国人口老龄化和劳动力萎缩时期。

It remains to be seen what comes of Trump’s trade war with China. Both sides have their economic vulnerabilities. Yet it seems clear that China’s are greater. Not only has the trade war postponed a long-overdue cleanup of the country’s opaque financial system; by jeopardizing the official growth target, it has driven the Chinese government back to the measures – notably debt-financed spending on infrastructure – that created the country’s existing financial problems. And recall that this is happening as China enters a period of demographic ageing and workforce contraction.

然而,中国拥有一项显著的优势,这可能会带来……摆脱困境的途径——就是在金融科技领域不断扩大对美国的领先优势。

Nevertheless, China has one striking advantage that may offer a way out of its difficulties – and that is its growing lead over the United States in the realm of financial technology.

加密货币的到来

The Coming of Crypto

正如我们所见,尽管有数百场抨击华尔街“狼群”的演讲和数万页新的金融监管文件出台,但如今的国际金融体系与十年前大危机爆发前夕相比,并没有发生根本性的改变。然而,这并不意味着第七章所述的金融演进进程已经停止。事实上,过去十年中出现了一系列重要的变革和创新,其中一些有可能在2028年之前给金融体系带来更为深远的影响。一个显著的变化是资产管理模式从“主动型”向“被动型”的转变。如今,包括低成本交易所交易基金(ETF)在内的被动型基金管理着8万亿美元的资产,占所有投资基金资产的20%。46投资于ETF的资金量从2007年的8100亿美元增长到2017年的3.4万亿美元。有人认为,高薪的人工选股者的时代即将终结,因为许多对冲基金的管理费与其收益毫无关系。47诚然,美国股市中高达90%的交易现在都是由被动型基金经理、高频交易员和量化基金完成的。48对于那些被算法挤出市场的主动型基金经理来说,唯一的安慰是被动策略可能存在隐藏风险,例如交易所交易票据(ETN)XIV,它原本旨在股市平静时获利,但在2018年2月市场波动加剧时崩盘。49

The international financial system is, as we have seen, not radically different today from the way it was on the eve of the great crisis ten years ago – despite hundreds of speeches directed against the wolves of Wall Street and tens of thousands of pages of new financial regulation. Yet that does not mean that the process of financial evolution described in Chapter 7 has ceased. There have in fact been a number of significant mutations and innovations in the past decade, some of which have the potential to bring about much more profound changes to the financial system between now and 2028. One striking change has been the shift in asset management from ‘active’ to ‘passive’ vehicles. Passive funds, which include low-cost exchange-traded funds (ETFs), today manage $8 trillion of assets, or 20 per cent of all investment fund assets.46 The amount of money invested in ETFs rose from $810 billion in 2007 to $3.4 trillion in 2017. There are those who believe that the days of the highly remunerated human stock-picker are numbered because the management fees of a great many hedge funds bear no relation to the returns they generate.47 Certainly, a very high proportion of trades on the US stock market – around 90 per cent – are now carried out by passive managers, high-frequency traders, and quantitative funds.48 The sole consolation for active managers being driven out of business by algorithms is that passive strategies may have hidden risks, as in the case of the exchange-traded note (ETN) XIV, which was designed to make money when the stock market was tranquil, but collapsed in February 2018 when volatility rose.49


过去十年中最受关注的金融创新莫过于基于区块链的“加密货币”的出现。其中第一个也是迄今为止最重要的加密货币——比特币——于……刚刚推出。在雷曼兄弟倒闭前几周,也就是2008年8月18日,一篇看似由一位日本计算机科学家撰写的论文发表了。“中本聪”实际上是一个或多个人的化名,截至撰写本文时,他们的身份仍然未知。对普通人来说,这个提议似乎很简单:“一种纯粹的点对点电子现金版本将允许在线支付直接从一方发送到另一方,而无需通过金融机构。”起初,比特币的购买和使用仅限于具有自由主义倾向的技术爱好者。早在大多数专业经济学家之前,犯罪分子就看到了这种无需第三方验证的支付网络的革命性潜力。毕竟,如果买家可以可靠地向卖家付款,而无需银行或信用卡公司来确保一方没有欺诈另一方,那么传统的政府监管形式就过时了。

The most discussed financial innovation of the past decade has been the advent of blockchain-based ‘cryptocurrencies’. The first and still the most important of these, Bitcoin, was launched just weeks before the failure of Lehman Brothers: on 18 August 2008, the date of publication of a paper by what appeared to be a Japanese computer scientist. ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ was in fact a pseudonym for one or more people whose identities still remain unknown at the time of writing. To the layman, the proposition seemed modest: ‘A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.’ At first, Bitcoins were bought and used only by technology enthusiasts with libertarian leanings. It was criminals – long before most professional economists – who were the next group to see the revolutionary potential of a payments network that did not require third-party verification. After all, if a payment can reliably be made from a buyer to a seller without the need for a bank or credit card company to ensure that one is not defrauding the other, then the conventional forms of government supervision and regulation are rendered obsolete.

金融危机——对一些全球最重要的银行而言是生死攸关的事件——却也为数字货币的概念提供了极具说服力的宣传。正如我们所见,在许多方面,现有的货币体系都是模拟时代的产物。由中央银行管理的、与贵金属没有任何关联的法定货币,是20世纪70年代布雷顿森林体系崩溃的产物。信用卡取代纸币成为消费者首选的支付方式,其起源也可追溯到20世纪后期:万事达卡的前身是20世纪60年代末的“万事达卡”(Master Charge)。如今处理银行和其他金融机构之间大部分国际转账的环球银行金融电信协会(SWIFT)于1973年在布鲁塞尔成立。比特币能否代表一场货币革命,将这一切彻底推翻?到2017年,似乎有相当数量的投资者愿意相信这种可能性。比特币的美元价格从年初的937美元飙升至12月16日的19000美元以上。在这一年中,通过数百种新加密货币的“首次代币发行”(ICO)筹集了超过60亿美元的资金——其中大多数是比特币。基于以太坊,以太坊是一个开源的、基于区块链的平台和操作系统,由一位名叫 Vitalik Buterin 的 19 岁俄罗斯裔加拿大人于 2013 年设计。

The financial crisis – a life-threatening event for some of the world’s most important banks – was a remarkably compelling advertisement for the notion of digital money. In many respects, as we have seen, the established monetary system is a product of the analog age. Fiat currencies managed by central banks, without any connection to precious metal, are a product of the 1970s, when the Bretton Woods system collapsed. Credit cards, which have displaced banknotes as the preferred means of payment for consumers, are also late-twentieth-century in origin: Mastercard originated as ‘Master Charge’ in the late 1960s. The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), which today handles most international transfers between banks and other financial institutions, was founded in Brussels in 1973. Could Bitcoin represent a monetary revolution that would consign all this to the financial past? By 2017 a critical mass of investors appeared willing to believe in this possibility. The dollar price of Bitcoin surged from $937 at the beginning of the year to above $19,000 on 16 December. In the course of the year, the equivalent of more than $6 billion was raised through ‘initial coin offerings’ (ICOs) of hundreds of new cryptocurrencies – most based on Ethereum, an open-source, blockchain-based platform and operating system devised in 2013 by a nineteen-year-old Russian-Canadian named Vitalik Buterin.

既有货币秩序的代表们对此不屑一顾。摩根大通首席执行官杰米·戴蒙在2017年9月巴克莱银行的一次会议上表示,比特币“比郁金香球茎还糟糕”,它是一种“骗局”,最终会崩盘。50 欧洲央行副行长维托尔·康斯坦西奥也赞同这一观点:“比特币就像郁金香一样,是一种投机工具……但绝不是货币,我们也不认为它会对中央银行或货币政策构成威胁。” 51保罗·克鲁格曼在2013年也表达过类似的怀疑态度。“这真的可行吗?……我不得不说,我仍然深表怀疑。” 52一年后,他得出结论:“比特币热潮过去是、现在仍然是与自由主义者的反政府幻想密切相关的。” 53然而,正是这位克鲁格曼在1998年预测,“互联网的增长将急剧放缓”,因为“大多数人之间没什么可说的”,并且“到2005年左右,人们就会清楚地认识到,互联网对经济的影响并不比传真机更大” 。54

Representatives of the established monetary order were dismissive. Bitcoin was ‘worse than tulip bulbs’, JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon said at a Barclays Conference in September 2017. It was ‘a fraud’ that would eventually blow up.50 ‘Bitcoin is a sort of tulip,’ agreed European Central Bank Vice President Vítor Constâncio. ‘It’s an instrument of speculation . . . but certainly not a currency, and we don’t see it as a threat to central banking or monetary policy.’51 Paul Krugman had expressed similar scepticism in 2013. ‘Can this actually work? . . . I have to say that I’m still deeply unconvinced.’52 A year later he concluded that ‘Bitcoin fever was and is intimately tied up with libertarian anti-government fantasies.’53 Yet this was the same Krugman who in 1998 had predicted that ‘the growth of the Internet [would] slow drastically’ because ‘most people have nothing to say to each other’ and that ‘by 2005 or so, it [would] become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.’54

没错,比特币泡沫在2017年末破裂。到2018年中期,其价格似乎在6000美元左右触底,远低于其令人咋舌的峰值。然而,这仍然远高于2017年8月的4500美元左右,更是2017年1月的六倍。尽管2017年发行的绝大多数加密货币和代币最终都将一文不值——尤其因为大多数ICO几乎可以肯定是欺诈性的——但比特币最终跌至零的可能性似乎不大。因此,用17世纪30年代中期的荷兰郁金香狂热来类比似乎并不恰当。相反,加密货币是金融创新的经典案例,类似于南海泡沫和20世纪90年代互联网泡沫破灭的结合体。比特币本身似乎是一种新的价值储存和投资资产——一种“数字黄金”,它为投资者提供了有保障的稀缺性和高流动性,以及与其他资产类别的低相关性。在 2018 年之前,比特币在下跌时已经经历了三次崩盘。约为其峰值的 80%;然而,每次新的底部都比前一次更高。

True, the Bitcoin bubble burst as 2017 drew to a close. By mid-2018 the price seemed to have found a floor at around $6,000, far below its heady peak. Yet this was still substantially higher than its August 2017 level of around $4,500, and six times higher than in January 2017. While the overwhelming majority of coins and tokens issued in 2017 will ultimately be worthless – not least because the majority of ICOs were almost certainly fraudulent – it seems unlikely that Bitcoin will end up at zero. The Dutch tulip mania of the mid-1630s therefore seems like the wrong analogy. Rather, cryptocurrencies are a classic case of financial innovation, like a mix between the South Sea Bubble and the 1990s dot-com boom and bust. Bitcoin itself appears to be a new store of value and investment asset – a type of ‘digital gold’ that provides investors with guaranteed scarcity and high mobility, as well as low correlation with other asset classes. Before 2018, Bitcoin had already experienced three crashes when it lost around 80 per cent of its peak value; yet the new floor has each time been higher than the previous one.

大多数加密货币的核心技术——区块链——允许创建一个加密的分布式数据库。每个用户都会创建两个数学上关联的“密钥”,一个私钥,一个公钥。公钥成为比特币地址,并广播到网络。为了广播一条可验证为我本人所发的“签名消息”,我会获取该消息,并使用我的私钥对其进行哈希运算。然后,我将哈希后的消息广播到网络。网络中的任何人都可以验证该消息是否确实来自我,因为只有我的公钥才能与哈希后的消息进行运算,从而生成可读的原始消息。私钥无法从公钥推导出来,并且使用私钥进行哈希运算的消息只能使用公钥进行解密。因此,像比特币这样的货币只是一个由计算机网络共享的公共账本。实际上并没有“硬币”在流通。所有操作都只是更新账本,以减少某人持有的硬币数量,并增加另一人的持有数量。所有者会发送一条签名消息,将其持有的硬币所有权转移给接收者的公钥。签名机制确保发送者是真正的所有者。交易被分组并以“区块”的形式添加到账本中,网络中的每个节点始终拥有该“区块链”的完整副本。节点只有通过解决比特币协议选择的加密难题才能向区块链添加区块(并获得比特币奖励)这需要将随机数输入哈希函数,因此会消耗计算能力。节点添加区块的概率等于其在网络中的算力份额。新区块随后与整个账本进行哈希运算,生成新的账本。

The core technology on which most cryptocurrencies are based – blockchain – allows the creation of an encrypted, distributed database. Each user creates two mathematically linked ‘keys’, one private, one public. The public key becomes the Bitcoin address and is broadcast to the network. To broadcast a ‘signed message’ that can be authenticated as mine, I take the message and process it in a hash function with my private key. I take the hashed message and broadcast it to the network. Anyone in the network can verify that the message is authentically mine, because only my public key can be processed with the hashed message to produce the legible original message. A private key cannot be derived from a public key and messages hashed with the private key can only be decrypted with the public key. A currency such as Bitcoin is thus just a public ledger shared by a network of computers. No actual ‘coins’ are passed around. All that can be done is to update the ledger to reduce one person’s holding of coins and increase another’s. The owner will send a signed message transferring ownership of his coins to a receiver’s public key. Signing guarantees the sender is the real owner. Transactions are grouped together and added to the ledger in ‘blocks’, and every node in the network has an entire copy of this ‘blockchain’ at all times. A node can add a block to the chain (and receive a Bitcoin reward)* only by solving a cryptographic puzzle chosen by the Bitcoin protocol, which entails running random numbers through a hash function, and thus consumes processing power. The probability that a node adds a block is equal to its share of network power. The new block is then hashed with the entire ledger to produce a new ledger.

区块链在三个方面存在差异:性质共识算法负责同步区块添加过程;每个区块的交易数量和手续费(如有);以及矿工因提供运行区块链所需的计算硬件和电力而获得的奖励方式。比特币的独特之处在于其创造者将其供应量设计得有限。在许多方面,中本聪的目标并非创造一种新的货币,而是创造一种终极安全资产,能够在投资者保护薄弱的司法管辖区保护财富免遭没收,并免受几乎普遍存在的货币贬值之害。加密技术和比特币计算网络的成本确保了绝对所有权和永久、不可篡改的交易。比特币具有便携性、流动性、匿名性和稀缺性。它从设计之初就被誉为“数字黄金”。一个简单的思想实验表明,6000美元对于这种新型价值储存手段来说是一个便宜的价格。迄今为止,大约有1700万枚比特币被挖出。根据瑞士信贷的数据,全球百万富翁的数量为3600万,他们的总财富为128.7万亿美元。如果百万富翁们集体决定将他们财富的1%投资于比特币,那么比特币的价格将超过75,000美元——如果考虑到所有丢失或被囤积的比特币,价格还会更高。即使百万富翁们只将他们资产的0.2%投资于比特币,价格也会在15,000美元左右。比特币期货合约的建立或许有助于降低比特币价格的波动性,从而提升其作为资产的吸引力。

Blockchains vary in three different respects: the nature of the consensus algorithm, which synchronizes the process of block addition; the number of transactions per block and fees, if any; and the way miners are rewarded for providing the computational hardware and electricity to run the blockchain. Bitcoin is unusual because its creator designed its supply to be limited. In many ways, Satoshi’s goal was not to create a new money but rather to create the ultimate safe asset, capable of protecting wealth from confiscation in jurisdictions with poor investor protection as well as from the near-universal scourge of currency depreciation. Encryption and the cost of Bitcoin’s computing network provide absolute ownership and permanent, unalterable transactions. Bitcoin is portable, liquid, anonymous and scarce. It is ‘digital gold’ by design. A simple thought experiment would imply that $6,000 is therefore a cheap price for this new store of value. Around 17 million Bitcoins have been mined to date. The number of millionaires in the world, according to Credit Suisse, is 36 million. Their total wealth is $128.7 trillion. If millionaires collectively decided to hold just 1 per cent of their wealth as Bitcoin, the price would be above $75,000 – higher, if adjustment is made for all the Bitcoins that have been lost or hoarded. Even if the millionaires held just 0.2 per cent of their assets as Bitcoin, the price would be around $15,000. The creation of futures contracts in Bitcoin might serve to reduce the volatility of the Bitcoin price, increasing its appeal as an asset.

然而,比特币的设计也存在缺陷。首先,也是显而易见的,比特币和黄金一样,并非便捷的支付手段或记账单位。其次,和黄金一样,如果存放在不安全的地方,比特币也可能丢失或被盗。经验反复表明,虽然比特币本身无法被黑客攻击,但存放大量比特币的交易所和钱包却并非如此——Mt. Gox交易所的倒闭就证明了这一点。第三个问题,或许也是更棘手的问题,是比特币的“工作量证明”共识算法需要消耗大量能源的专用芯片。一个意想不到的后果是,比特币挖矿活动越来越集中在少数几个地方。比特币的开采权可能掌握在很多人手中——其中很多是中国人——只要有廉价能源,就会被他们掌控。危险并非仅仅存在于理论上,一个中国财团有可能控制超过一半的挖矿节点,从而随意篡改比特币账本。55这方面,以及在价格波动性方面,比特币显然不如黄金,因为黄金的挖矿仍然是去中心化的。或许,比特币最好被视为数字黄金的一种期权,而不是数字黄金本身。

Yet Bitcoin’s design has drawbacks. The first and obvious one is that, like gold, Bitcoin is not a convenient means of payment or unit of account. The second is that, like gold, it can be lost or stolen if stored in an insecure location. Experience has shown repeatedly that, while Bitcoin itself cannot be hacked, the same cannot be said of all the exchanges and wallets where a significant proportion of Bitcoins are held – as revealed by the case of the failed exchange Mt. Gox. A third and perhaps more intractable problem is that Bitcoin’s ‘proof-of-work’ consensus algorithm requires specialized computer chips that consume a great deal of energy. One unforeseen consequence has been the increasing concentration of Bitcoin mining in a relatively few hands – many of them Chinese – wherever there is cheap energy. The danger is not merely theoretical that a Chinese group could achieve control of more than half of all mining nodes, enabling it to alter the Bitcoin ledger at will.55 In this respect, as well as in its price volatility, Bitcoin is clearly inferior to gold, the mining of which remains decentralized. Perhaps Bitcoin is best thought of as an option on digital gold, rather than digital gold itself.

因此,正如技术发展史上经常出现的情况一样,先行者未必是最终的赢家。或许以太坊正是凭借其更高的灵活性和适应性,才能成为一项更具持久性的技术。以太坊面临的主要风险在于监管:如果美国证券交易委员会认定所有ICO都属于证券监管的范畴(就像2017年对分布式自治组织发行的代币所做的那样),那么撰写白皮书并出售以太坊新代币将不再是获得廉价资金的最快捷径。此类监管措施已在中国和韩国出现,但几乎可以肯定的是,ICO在至少某些司法管辖区仍将被允许甚至鼓励。对基于区块链的货币梦想而言,更严重的威胁在于某个主要国家的政府可能会决定创建自己的加密货币。这并非不可能。正如我们所看到的,货币并不需要依赖国家的认可,但在历史的大部分时间里,国家都试图垄断“法定货币”的生产或至少对其进行监管,而这往往是一项有利可图的活动,也是权力的来源。

It is therefore possible that, as has often been the case in the history of the technology, the first mover is not the winner. Perhaps Ethereum will prove a more enduring technology precisely because of its greater flexibility and adaptability. The main risk to Ethereum is regulatory: if the Securities and Exchange Commission determines that all ICOs are covered by securities regulation (as it did in the case of the tokens issued by the Distributed Autonomous Organization in 2017), then writing a white paper and selling new tokens for Ethereum will cease to be the shortest route to cheap capital. Such regulatory clampdowns have already happened in China and Korea, though it is almost certain that ICOs will continue to be permitted and even encouraged in at least some jurisdictions. The more serious threat to the dream of blockchain-based money is that a major government may decide to create its own cryptocurrency. That would not be surprising. As we have seen, money does not need to be dependent on a state’s imprimatur, but for most of history states have sought to monopolize the production or at least the regulation of ‘legal tender’, and this has often been a profitable activity as well as a source of power.

然而,还有另一种可能的场景——区块链的成功“应用案例”并非货币。目前,区块链已被用于存储产权证(例如在格鲁吉亚共和国)和医疗记录(例如在爱沙尼亚)。或许,这些应用场景比仅仅记录金融交易更能发挥区块链的优势。诚然,目前大多数国家的医疗记录存储系统远逊于现有的支付系统。未来,集中式档案库……最早出现在中世纪和近代早期欧洲的区块链可能会逐渐被大型分布式账本所取代。与此同时,货币体系或许仍将经历演进而非革命。毕竟,现有的基于法定货币的支付系统,随着计算机处理能力的提升,升级起来相对容易,无需迫切需要采用区块链技术。

There is, nevertheless, another conceivable scenario – and that is one in which the successful ‘use-case’ for blockchain turns out to be something other than money. Already blockchain has been adapted for the storage of title deeds (for example in the Republic of Georgia) and medical records (in Estonia). It may be that these are better roles for the technology than merely recording financial transactions. Certainly, the current system for storing health records in most countries is far inferior to the current system of making payments. In future, the centralized archives that first made their appearance in medieval and early modern Europe may gradually give way to large distributed ledgers. Money, meanwhile, may remain subject to evolution rather than revolution. After all, existing payments systems, based on fiat currencies, have proved relatively easy to upgrade as computer processing power has increased, without any pressing need to employ blockchain.

这是现代金融史上最不为人知却或许最为重要的发展:移动在线支付平台的迅速崛起。2007年,全球仅有7家移动支付服务商;到2016年,这一数字已增至277家。 56此类服务的年交易额预计将从2015年的4500亿美元增长到2019年的超过1万亿美元。 57在这场竞赛中,中国遥遥领先,美国则远远落后。2017年8月,微信支付拥有6亿用户,支付宝紧随其后,拥有4亿用户。美国领先的支付平台PayPal(其历史可追溯至1998年)拥有2.1亿用户,而Apple Pay的用户数仅为8700万,远远落后。更令人瞩目的是,中国的移动支付交易额是美国的11倍。 58当然,中国支付平台的成功在一定程度上反映了中国庞大的人口基数。然而,中国互联网公司腾讯和阿里巴巴在说服消费者转向移动支付方面,比它们的美国同行做得好得多。根据2017年底的数据,约45%的中国互联网用户在调查前一个月内使用过移动支付,而北美和欧洲的这一比例分别为27%和22%。 59而且,中国的支付平台现在的速度也远超西方竞​​争对手:阿里巴巴的支付系统在2016年每秒可处理12万笔交易,而PayPal仅为3.8万笔。 60如今,阿里巴巴的这一数字已达到每秒25万笔。美国人和欧洲人继续使用纸币和硬币,并盲目地接受信用卡寡头垄断,这看起来不仅仅是古怪,而是倒退了。

This is the least noticed and yet perhaps the most important development in modern financial history: the rapid rise of mobile online payment platforms. In 2007 there were just seven mobile payments services in the world; by 2016 there were 277.56 The annual transaction volume for such services is forecast to rise from $450 billion in 2015 to over a trillion dollars by 2019.57 In this race, China has led the field, with the United States lagging a long way behind. In August 2017, WeChat Pay had 600 million users, followed by Alipay with 400 million. The leading American platform PayPal – which originated as long ago as 1998 – had 210 million users, with Apple Pay far behind at 87 million. Even more striking, the volume of mobile payments was eleven times higher in China than in the United States.58 To be sure, the success of China’s payments platforms partly reflects the much greater size of the Chinese population. Yet the Chinese Internet companies Tencent and Alibaba have done a much better job than their American counterparts of persuading consumers to switch to mobile payments. According to late 2017 data, around 45 per cent of Chinese Internet users made a mobile payment in the month before the survey, compared with 27 per cent in North America and just 22 per cent in Europe.59 And China’s payments platforms are now significantly faster than their Western rivals: Alibaba’s payments system could process 120,000 transactions per second in 2016, compared with 38,000 for PayPal.60 Now the Alibaba figure is 250,000. The continued use of banknotes and coins by Americans and Europeans and their unthinking submission to the credit card oligopoly begins to look more than merely quaint. It looks backward.

没有哪家公司比它更能象征中国在各领域日益增长的领先地位蚂蚁金服在金融科技领域的地位远超其他公司。蚂蚁金服于2011年从阿里巴巴剥离出来,但仍是马云打造的科技帝国的一部分。其于2013年设立的货币市场基金余额宝,截至2018年3月底管理着2660亿美元的资产,规模与西方最大的ETF(SPDR标普500指数ETF)相近。2017年1月至2018年3月期间,蚂蚁金服的消费贷款规模翻了一番,达到6000亿元人民币(约合950亿美元),使其成为中国第二大消费银行。蚂蚁金服的崛起及其在南亚、非洲和南美等新兴市场的迅速扩张,表明一种新的支付架构正在形成,未来或许能够与20世纪中期兴起的美元支付体系相媲美。在线支付平台与信用卡一样快捷,而且更加方便(只需一部智能手机即可完成支付),它们与加密货币一样,极有可能成为未来的货币发展方向。新的金融秩序即将到来——美国越是积极利用现有秩序对敌对势力(及其贸易伙伴)实施制裁,对新秩序的需求就越发增长。已有大量证据表明,蚂蚁金服对发展中国家的小企业来说是一个极具吸引力的平台。 61 由于美国重新对伊朗实施制裁,德国外交部长于2017年8月宣布,他渴望“通过建立独立于美国的支付渠道、欧洲货币基金和独立的SWIFT(国际支付)系统来加强欧洲的自主性”。 62鉴于欧元区自2008年以来所经历的一切,似乎不太可能在那里建立新的支付系统。考虑到中国在该领域的领先地位,全球美元的替代方案很可能正在北京——或者更确切地说,是在中国金融科技之都杭州和深圳——酝酿之中。

No company better symbolizes China’s growing lead in financial technology than Ant Financial, which was spun out of Alibaba in 2011 but remains a part of the technology empire built by Jack Ma. The money market fund known as Yu’e Bao (‘leftover treasure’), which was set up in 2013, had $266 billion under management at the end of March 2018, making it similar in size to the largest western ETF (the SPDR S&P 500 ETF). Between January 2017 and March 2018, Ant’s consumer lending doubled to 600 billion yuan ($95 billion), making it effectively the second-largest bank for consumers in China. The rise of Ant – and its rapid spread into other emerging markets, from South Asia to Africa and South America – suggests that a new payments architecture is now taking shape that could one day rival the dollar-based system that arose in the middle of the twentieth century. Just as fast as credit cards and more convenient (as payments can simply be made with a smartphone), online payments platforms are as plausibly the future of money as cryptocurrencies. A new financial order is coming – and the more aggressively the United States uses the existing order to impose sanctions on its enemies (and their trading partners), the more the demand for a new order grows. There is already ample evidence that Ant Financial is a highly attractive platform for small businesses in the developing world.61 Frustrated by the re-imposition of US sanctions on Iran, the German Foreign Minister declared in August 2017 that he aspired to ‘strengthen European autonomy by establishing payment channels independent of the US, a European monetary fund and an independent SWIFT [international payments] system’.62 After all the Eurozone has been through since 2008, it seems unlikely that a new payments system will be developed there. Given China’s lead in this domain, the alternative to the global dollar may well be under construction in Beijing – or rather in Hangzhou and Shenzhen, the capitals of Chinese fintech.

简而言之,特朗普政府或许能在与中国的贸易战中胜出,但中国或许能在构建下一代金融服务的金融竞赛中拔得头筹——而历史经验强烈表明,后者的竞争才是真正重要的。毕竟《货币崛起》不仅讲述了金融演进的故事——阐释了现代货币体系关键组成部分的起源,还揭示了金融演进始终与权力的兴衰紧密相连:与强权国家和帝国的兴衰息息相关。在货币和金融市场发展史的每一个阶段,都是那些在金融领域勇于创新的政治实体最终占据了地缘政治主导地位:文艺复兴时期的佛罗伦萨、荷兰共和国、大英帝国、美国。如果中国能够成功引领下一场金融革命,那么它目前在管理从西方引进的制度方面遇到的困难或许只是暂时的。如果美国未能充分发挥当今科技的金融潜力,那么它的霸权时代必将走向终结。

In short, the Trump administration may win its trade war with China, but China may win the financial race to build the next generation of financial services – and history strongly suggests that the latter contest is the one that matters. After all, The Ascent of Money not only tells the story of financial evolution – explaining the origins of the key components of the modern monetary system. It also shows that financial evolution has always been bound up with the ebb and flow of power: with the rise and fall of big states and empires. At every stage in the history of money and financial markets, it was the financially innovative polity that became geopolitically dominant: Renaissance Florence, the Dutch Republic, the British Empire, the United States. If China succeeds in leading the next financial revolution, then its current difficulties in managing institutions that it imported from the West may prove to be transient. If the United States fails to realize the full financial potential of today’s technology, the days of its ascendancy will surely be numbered.

然而,金融史是一部演化史——它讲述的是间断平衡而非可预测的线性发展。或许考虑另一种近期情景也同样重要:脆弱的银行体系、过高的债务和不断上升的全球利率相结合,可能对中国构成潜在威胁,尤其是在中国正处于人口结构转折点之际。一些西方评论员多年来一直预测中国将爆发金融危机,以至于他们的警告早已失去了可信度。但这并不意味着他们的预测不会在未来某个时候应验。在本书第一版出版的2006-2008年间预测全球金融危机,并非在银行家会议上赢得掌声的方式。然而,事实证明,他们的预测极具先见之明。在雷曼兄弟倒闭十年后,如今唯一能与2008年美国信贷危机在全球影响上相提并论的事件,的确就是一场中国危机。

Yet financial history is an evolutionary story – of punctuated equilibria rather than predictable linear developments. It would probably be just as well to consider another near-future scenario: that the combination of a fragile banking system, excessive debt and rising global interest rates could be a potentially dangerous one for China, especially as the country passes a demographic inflection point. Some Western commentators have been predicting a Chinese financial crisis for so many years that their warnings have lost all credibility. But that does not mean they will not at some point be right. Predicting a global financial crisis in the years 2006–8, when the first edition of this book was written, was not the way to win applause at bankers’ conferences. It nevertheless proved prescient. Ten years after the failure of Lehman Brothers, the only imaginable event that today could match the 2008 American credit crunch in terms of its global impact would indeed be a China crisis.

致谢

Acknowledgments

写作虽为孤独之举,但任何一本书的创作都不是孤军奋战。我衷心感谢以下档案馆的工作人员:阿姆斯特丹历史博物馆;巴黎国家图书馆;伦敦大英博物馆;孟菲斯棉花交易所棉花博物馆;海牙荷兰国家档案馆;新奥尔良路易斯安那州立博物馆;佛罗伦萨市档案馆美第奇档案馆;爱丁堡苏格兰国家档案馆;威尼斯国家图书馆;伦敦罗斯柴尔德档案馆;以及爱丁堡苏格兰寡妇档案馆。许多学者和图书馆员慷慨地回应了我的求助。在此,我尤其要感谢Melanie Aspey、Tristram Clarke、Florence Groshens、Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli、Greg Lambousy、Valerie Moar、Liesbeth Strasser、Jonathan Taylor和Lodewijk Wagenaar。Andrew Novo为我提供了宝贵的研究帮助。

Though writing is a solitary activity, no book is a solo venture. I am grateful to the staff at the following archives: the Amsterdam Historical Museum; the National Library, Paris; the British Museum, London; the Cotton Museum at the Memphis Cotton Exchange; the Dutch National Archives, The Hague; the Louisiana State Museum, New Orleans; the Medici Archives, Florentine City Archive; the National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh; the National Library, Venice; the Rothschild Archive, London; and the Scottish Widows Archive, Edinburgh. A number of scholars and librarians generously responded to my requests for assistance. In particular, I would like to thank Melanie Aspey, Tristram Clarke, Florence Groshens, Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli, Greg Lambousy, Valerie Moar, Liesbeth Strasser, Jonathan Taylor and Lodewijk Wagenaar. I have had invaluable research assistance from Andrew Novo.

特别感谢以下几位金融专家接受我的采访:多明戈·卡瓦洛、约瑟夫·迪法塔、约翰·埃里克、肯尼斯·格里芬、威廉·格罗斯、何塞·皮涅拉、罗斯柴尔德勋爵、伊夫林·德·罗斯柴尔德爵士、理查德·斯克鲁格斯、乔治·索罗斯、乔治·史蒂文森、卡门·贝拉斯科、保罗·沃尔克、谢伦·沃特金斯和罗伯特·佐利克。此外,我也从摩根士丹利和GLG Partners举办的活动中与参与者的非正式交流中获益匪浅。

Special thanks go to the select group of financial experts who agreed to be interviewed on the record: Domingo Cavallo, Joseph DiFatta, John Elick, Kenneth Griffin, William Gross, José Piñera, Lord Rothschild, Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, Richard Scruggs, George Soros, George Stevenson, Carmen Velasco, Paul Volcker, Sherron Watkins and Robert Zoellick. I have also learned much from informal conversations with participants at events organized by Morgan Stanley and GLG Partners.

这是一本在大西洋两岸都由企鹅出版社出版的书。在纽约,我第一次参与编辑工作,这既是一种荣幸,也是一种乐趣。作者:安·戈多夫。在伦敦,西蒙·温德确保印刷品中没有任何晦涩难懂的术语。迈克尔·佩奇作为文字编辑,工作出色。此外,还要感谢理查德·杜吉德、露丝·斯蒂姆森、罗西·格莱舍、爱丽丝·道森、海伦·弗雷泽、斯特凡·麦格拉斯、露丝·平克尼和佩内洛普·沃格勒。

This is a Penguin book on both sides of the Atlantic. In New York it was a pleasure and privilege to be edited for the first time by Ann Godoff. In London Simon Winder made sure that no unintelligible jargon made it into print. Michael Page did a superb job as copy-editor. Thanks are also due to Richard Duguid, Ruth Stimson, Rosie Glaisher, Alice Dawson, Helen Fraser, Stefan McGrath, Ruth Pinkney and Penelope Vogler.

与我之前的三本书一样,《金钱的崛起》从一开始就是一部电视连续剧,同时也是一本书。在第四频道,我非常感谢朱利安·贝拉米、拉尔夫·李、凯文·莱戈,尤其是哈米什·米库拉。我们之间偶尔的摩擦总是能激发创作灵感。在纽约的W-N​​ET/13频道,斯蒂芬·西格勒一直是我不可或缺的支持者。我尤其要感谢由芭芭拉·班蒂沃利奥领导的13频道筹款团队,感谢他们所做的一切努力。如果没有奇美利卡传媒组建的这支杰出团队,无论是剧集还是书籍都不可能完成:我们才华横溢的摄影师德瓦尔德·奥克玛、研究员罗莎琳德·本特利、特约摄影师沃恩·马修斯、偶尔担任录音师的保罗·帕拉贡和罗纳德·范德斯佩克、助理制片人乔安娜·波茨、制片经理薇薇安·斯蒂尔以及制片协调员夏洛特·威尔金斯——当然,还有她的前任海达·阿奇博尔德。至于我的奇美利卡同事梅兰妮·福尔和阿德里安·彭尼克,可以说,没有他们,《金钱的崛起》这部剧集根本不可能问世。

Like my last three books, The Ascent of Money was from its earliest inception a television series as well as a book. At Channel 4 I owe debts to Julian Bellamy, Ralph Lee, Kevin Lygo and, above all, Hamish Mykura. Our occasional tensions were always creative. At W-NET/Channel 13 in New York Stephen Segaller has been an invaluable supporter. I am especially grateful to the Channel 13 fund-raising team, led by Barbara Bantivoglio, for all their efforts. Neither series nor book could have been made without the extraordinary team of people assembled by Chimerica Media: Dewald Aukema, our peerless cinematographer, Rosalind Bentley, our researcher, Vaughan Matthews, our additional cameraman, Paul Paragon and Ronald van der Speck, our occasional sound men, Joanna Potts, our assistant producer, Vivienne Steel, our production manager, and Charlotte Wilkins, our production co-ordinator – not forgetting her predecessor Hedda Archbold. As for Melanie Fall and Adrian Pennink, my fellow Chimericans, suffice to say that without them The Ascent of Money would never have got off the ground.

在众多帮助我们拍摄这部剧集的人中,有不少“协调员”竭尽全力地提供帮助。在此,我要感谢Sergio Ballivian、Rudra Banerji、Matias de Sa Moreira、Makarena Gagliardi、Laurens Grant、Juan Harrington、Fernando Mecklenburg、Alexandra Sanchez、Tiziana Tortarolo、Khaliph Troup、Sebastiano Venturo和Eelco Vijzelaar。我的朋友Chris Wilson确保我没有错过任何航班。

Among the many people who helped us film the series, a number of ‘fixers’ went out of their way to help. My thanks go to Sergio Ballivian, Rudra Banerji, Matias de Sa Moreira, Makarena Gagliardi, Laurens Grant, Juan Harrington, Fernando Mecklenburg, Alexandra Sanchez, Tiziana Tortarolo, Khaliph Troup, Sebastiano Venturo and Eelco Vijzelaar. My friend Chris Wilson ensured that I missed no planes.

我非常幸运能与安德鲁·怀利(Andrew Wylie)这样世界顶尖的文学经纪人合作,也能与苏·艾顿(Sue Ayton)这样在英国电视领域与之匹敌的经纪人合作。我还要感谢詹姆斯·普伦(James Pullen)以及怀利经纪公司伦敦和纽约办事处的所有其他员工。

I am extremely fortunate to have in Andrew Wylie the best literary agent in the world and in Sue Ayton his counterpart in the realm of British television. My thanks also go to James Pullen and all the other staff in the London and New York offices of the Wylie Agency.

一些历史学家、经济学家和金融家众多从业人员慷慨地阅读了稿件的全部或部分内容,并就关键问题进行了讨论。在此,我要感谢Rawi Abdelal、Ewen Cameron Watt、Richard Carty、Rafael Di Tella、Mohamed El-Erian、Benjamin Friedman、Brigitte Granville、Laurence Kotlikoff、Robert Litan、George Magnus、Ian Mukherjee、Greg Peters、Richard Roberts、Emmanuel Roman、William Silber、André Stern、Lawrence Summers、Richard Sylla、Nassim Taleb、Peter Temin和James Tisch。毋庸置疑,文中所有事实和解释上的错误均由我本人承担。

A number of historians, economists and financial practitioners generously read all or part of the manuscript in draft or discussed key issues. I would like to thank Rawi Abdelal, Ewen Cameron Watt, Richard Carty, Rafael Di Tella, Mohamed El-Erian, Benjamin Friedman, Brigitte Granville, Laurence Kotlikoff, Robert Litan, George Magnus, Ian Mukherjee, Greg Peters, Richard Roberts, Emmanuel Roman, William Silber, André Stern, Lawrence Summers, Richard Sylla, Nassim Taleb, Peter Temin and James Tisch. Needless to say, all errors of fact and interpretation that remain are my fault alone.

本书的研究和写作是在我个人经历巨大变故的时期完成的。如果没有三所学术机构的理解和支持,这一切根本不可能实现。在牛津大学,我要感谢耶稣学院的院长和各位院士,以及奥里尔学院的同仁和博德利图书馆的各位馆员。在斯坦福大学胡佛研究所,我要感谢所长约翰·雷西安及其优秀的团队,特别是杰夫·布利斯、威廉·邦内特、诺埃尔·科拉克、理查德·苏萨、塞莱斯特·塞托、黛博拉·文图拉和丹·威廉米。为本书的创作提供帮助或启发的胡佛研究所研究员包括罗伯特·巴罗、斯蒂芬·哈伯、阿尔文·拉布什卡和巴里·温加斯特。

This book was researched and written at a time of considerable personal upheaval. Without the understanding and support of three academic institutions it would quite simply have been impossible. At Oxford University I would like to thank the Principal and Fellows of Jesus College, their counterparts at Oriel College and the librarians of the Bodleian. At the Hoover Institution, Stanford, I owe debts to John Raisian, the Director, and his excellent staff, particularly Jeff Bliss, William Bonnett, Noel Kolak, Richard Sousa, Celeste Szeto, Deborah Ventura and Dan Wilhelmi. Hoover Fellows who have helped or inspired this work include Robert Barro, Stephen Haber, Alvin Rabushka and Barry Weingast.

然而,我最感激的还是我在哈佛的同事们。要一一感谢哈佛历史系的每一位成员实在太费时间,所以我只感谢那些直接为这个项目做出贡献的人。查尔斯·迈尔一直是我灵感和友谊的源泉。吉姆·汉金斯在佛罗伦萨热情款待并提供了帮助。我还要感谢大卫·阿米蒂奇、埃雷兹·马内拉、欧内斯特·梅和丹尼尔·萨金特(可惜他现在去了伯克利),是他们把国际史系打造成了跨学科历史研究的理想场所。安德鲁·戈登和他的继任者詹姆斯·克洛彭伯格以卓越的才能和敏锐的洞察力领导着这个系。如果没有珍妮特·哈奇和她的团队,行政、研究和教学这三大支柱中至少有一个会崩溃。

My biggest debts, however, are to my colleagues at Harvard. It would take much too long to thank every member of the Harvard History Department individually, so let me confine myself to those who directly contributed to this project. Charles Maier has been a constant source of inspiration and friendship. Jim Hankins offered hospitality and help in Florence. I would also like to thank David Armitage, Erez Manela, Ernest May and Daniel Sargent (now, alas, lost to Berkeley) for establishing International History as the perfect milieu for interdisciplinary historical research. Andrew Gordon and his successor James Kloppenberg have chaired the Department with exceptional skill and sensitivity. And without Janet Hatch and her staff, at least one of the three spinning plates of administration, research and teaching would have crashed to the ground.

在欧洲研究中心,我很幸运能够分享与 David Blackbourn、Patricia Craig、Paul Dzus、Patrice Higonnet、Stanley Hoffman、Maya Jasanoff、Katiana Orluc、Anna Popiel、Sandy Selesky、Cindy Skach、Michelle Weitzel 和 Daniel Ziblatt 等人一起探讨空间和思想。

At the Centre of European Studies I have been lucky to share space and thoughts with, among others, David Blackbourn, Patricia Craig, Paul Dzus, Patrice Higonnet, Stanley Hoffman, Maya Jasanoff, Katiana Orluc, Anna Popiel, Sandy Selesky, Cindy Skach, Michelle Weitzel and Daniel Ziblatt.

2006-2007年间,最需要我帮助的莫过于哈佛商学院的同事们。首先,我要感谢院长杰伊·莱特(Jay Light)在我最艰难的时刻给予我的关怀。同时,我也要感谢国际经济商业与政府研究组的所有成员,感谢他们包容我那些计划外的缺勤,尤其要感谢理查德·维托(Richard Vietor),他当时被我冷落了;还要感谢拉维·阿卜杜勒(Rawi Abdelal)、劳拉·阿尔法罗(Laura Alfaro)、迭戈·科明(Diego Comin)、阿瑟·戴姆里奇(Arthur Daemmrich)、拉斐尔·迪·特拉(Rafael Di Tella)、凯瑟琳·杜根(Catherine Duggan)、拉克希米·艾耶尔(Lakshmi Iyer)、诺埃尔·毛雷尔(Noel Maurer)、大卫·莫斯(David Moss)、阿尔多·穆萨基奥(Aldo Musacchio)、福里斯特·莱因哈特(Forest Reinhardt)、胡里奥·罗滕贝格(Julio Rotemberg)、黛博拉·斯帕(Debora Spar)、贡纳尔·特朗布尔(Gunnar Trumbull)、路易斯·威尔斯(Louis Wells)和埃里克·沃克(Eric Werker)。扎克·佩莱里蒂(Zac Pelleriti)也提供了至关重要的行政协助。

It was above all my colleagues at Harvard Business School who had to take the strain during 2006–7. First and foremost, I thank Dean Jay Light for being so kind to me at a time of crisis. But I am equally grateful to all the members of the Business and Government in the International Economy unit for tolerating my unscheduled absences, in particular Richard Vietor, whom I left in the lurch, as well as Rawi Abdelal, Laura Alfaro, Diego Comin, Arthur Daemmrich, Rafael Di Tella, Catherine Duggan, Lakshmi Iyer, Noel Maurer, David Moss, Aldo Musacchio, Forest Reinhardt, Julio Rotemberg, Debora Spar, Gunnar Trumbull, Louis Wells and Eric Werker. Zac Pelleriti has provided vital administrative assistance.

此外,还要感谢史蒂文·布卢姆菲尔德和他在韦瑟黑德国际事务中心的同事们;格雷厄姆·艾利森和贝尔弗科学与国际事务中心的每一位成员;克劳迪娅·戈尔丁和经济史研讨会的其他参与者;以及最后但同样重要的是,多萝西·奥斯汀​​、戴安娜·埃克和洛厄尔之家的所有其他居民。

Thanks are also due to Steven Bloomfield and his colleagues at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs; Graham Allison and everyone at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs; Claudia Goldin and other participants at the Workshop in Economic History; and, last but not least, Dorothy Austin and Diana Eck and all the other denizens of Lowell House.

最后,我要感谢查尔斯河两岸的所有学生,特别是我的 10b 班、1961 班、1964 班和 1965 班的学生。我从他们的众多论文以及无数次的正式和非正式谈话中学到了很多,这些都让在哈佛工作成为一种乐趣。

Finally, I thank all my students on both sides of the Charles River, particularly those in my classes 10b, 1961, 1964 and 1965. I have learned from their many papers and from the countless formal and informal conversations that make working at Harvard such a joy.

在本书写作期间,我的妻子苏珊经历了一场严重的事故和其他种种挫折,但她最终战胜了病魔。我对她以及我们的孩子们——菲利克斯、弗雷娅和拉克兰——负有最大的恩情。我只希望我能用更可靠的货币来偿还他们。

In the time that this book was written, my wife Susan fought her way back from a severe accident and other reverses. To her and to our children, Felix, Freya and Lachlan, I owe the biggest debt. I only wish that I were able to repay them in a sounder currency.

马萨诸塞州剑桥,2008年6月

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, JUNE 2008

笔记

Notes

介绍

Introduction

 1.准确来说,这是 2006 年第三季度至 2007 年第三季度人均可支配个人收入的增长。此后一直停滞不前,2007 年 3 月至 2008 年 3 月期间几乎没有增长。数据来自《2008 年总统经济报告》表 B-31:http://www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/ [已失效]。

 1. To be precise, this was the increase in per capita disposable personal income between the third quarter of 2006 and the third quarter of 2007. It has since been static, rising barely at all between March 2007 and March 2008. Data from Economic Report of the President 2008, table B-31: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/ [inactive].

 2. Carmen DeNavas-Walt、Bernadette D. Proctor 和 Jessica Smith,《美国的收入、贫困和医疗保险覆盖率:2006 年》(华盛顿特区,2007 年 8 月),第 4 页。

 2. Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor and Jessica Smith, Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2006 (Washington, DC, August 2007), p. 4.

 3.我们看到了机遇:高盛 2007 年年度报告(纽约,2008 年)。 

 3We See Opportunity: Goldman Sachs 2007 Annual Report (New York, 2008).

 4. Paul Collier,《最底层的十亿人:为什么最贫穷的国家正在失败以及如何解决这个问题》(牛津,2007 年)。

 4. Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (Oxford, 2007).

 5. David Wessel,《我们泡沫问题的根源》,《华尔街日报》,2008 年 1 月 17 日。

 5. David Wessel, ‘A Source of Our Bubble Trouble’, Wall Street Journal, 17 January 2008.

 6. Stephen Roach,《特别汇编:莱福德礁 2006》,摩根士丹利研究(2006 年 11 月 21 日),第 4 页。

 6. Stephen Roach, ‘Special Compendium: Lyford Cay 2006’, Morgan Stanley Research (21 November 2006), p. 4.

 7.米尔顿·弗里德曼和安娜·J·施瓦茨,《美国货币史,1867-1960》(普林斯顿,1963 年)。

 7. Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (Princeton, 1963).

 8. Princeton Survey Research Associates International 为美国国家信贷咨询基金会准备的《金融素养调查》,2007 年 4 月 19 日:http://www.nfcc.org/NFCC_SummaryReport_ToplineFinal.pdf [已失效]。

 8. Princeton Survey Research Associates International, prepared for the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, ‘Financial Literacy Survey’, 19 April 2007: http://www.nfcc.org/NFCC_SummaryReport_ToplineFinal.pdf [inactive].

 9. Alexander R. Konrad,“金融基础知识让公民感到困惑”,《哈佛深红报》,2008 年 2 月 2 日。

 9. Alexander R. Konrad, ‘Finance Basics Elude Citizens’, Harvard Crimson, 2 February 2008.

 10.美联社,“调查发现青少年仍然缺乏金融素养”,2006 年 4 月 5 日:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12168872/

 10. Associated Press, ‘Teens Still Lack Financial Literacy, Survey Finds’, 5 April, 2006: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12168872/.

1. 贪婪之梦

1. Dreams of Avarice

 1.《没有金钱的世界》,《社会主义标准报》(1979年7月)。这段文字摘自《四百万年轻人的朋友们》。Travailleurs',Un Monde sans Argent:Le Communisme(巴黎,1975-6):http://www.geocities.com/~johngray/stanmond.htm [无效]。

 1. ‘A World without Money’, Socialist Standard (July 1979). The passage was a translated extract from ‘Les Amis de Quatre Millions de Jeune Travailleurs’, Un Monde sans Argent: Le Communisme (Paris, 1975–6): http://www.geocities.com/~johngray/stanmond.htm [inactive].

 2.事实上,马克思和恩格斯本人建议的不是废除货币,而是“通过国家资本和独家垄断的国家银行将信贷集中到国家手中”:《共产党宣言》第5条。

 2. Indeed, Marx and Engels had themselves recommended not the abolition of money but ‘Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly’: clause 5 of The Communist Manifesto.

 3. Juan Forero,“亚马逊部落突然离开丛林家园”,2006 年 5 月 11 日:http://www.entheology.org/edoto/anmviewer.asp ?a=244 。

 3. Juan Forero, ‘Amazonian Tribe Suddenly Leaves Jungle Home’, 11 May 2006: http://www.entheology.org/edoto/anmviewer.asp?a=244.

 4.克利福德·史密斯,《弗朗西斯科·皮萨罗与秘鲁的征服》(蒙大拿州怀特菲什,2007 年 [1931 年])。

 4. Clifford Smyth, Francisco Pizarro and the Conquest of Peru (Whitefish, Montana, 2007 [1931]).

 5. Michael Wood,《征服者》(伦敦,2001 年),第 128 页。

 5. Michael Wood, Conquistadors (London, 2001), p. 128.

 6.要了解征服者们从其角度出发的生动描述,其中清楚地表明黄金是他们的主要动机,请参阅 1533 年 11 月埃尔南多·皮萨罗写给圣多明各皇家觐见的信,该信收录于克莱门茨·R·马克姆 (编) 的《秘鲁发现报告》(伦敦,1872 年),第 113-127 页。

 6. For a vivid account from the conquistadors’ vantage point, which makes it clear that gold was their prime motive, see the November 1533 letter from Hernando Pizarro to the Royal Audience of Santo Domingo, in Clements R. Markham (ed.), Reports on the Discovery of Peru (London, 1872), pp. 113–27.

 7. MA Burkholder,《殖民地拉丁美洲》(第2版,牛津,1994年),第46页。

 7. M. A. Burkholder, Colonial Latin America (2nd edn., Oxford, 1994), p. 46.

 8. J. Hemming,《印加人的征服》(伦敦,2004 年),第 77 页。

 8. J. Hemming, Conquest of the Incas (London, 2004), p. 77.

 9.同上,第 355 页。

 9. Ibid., p. 355.

 10. Wood,《征服者》,第 38、148 页。

 10. Wood, Conquistadors, pp. 38, 148.

 11. Hemming,《征服》,第 392 页。

 11. Hemming, Conquest, p. 392.

 12. P. Bakewell,《拉丁美洲史》(第二版,牛津,2004 年),第 186 页。

 12. P. Bakewell, A History of Latin America (2nd edn., Oxford, 2004), p. 186.

 13. Hemming,《征服》,第 356 页及后续页。

 13. Hemming, Conquest, pp. 356ff.

 14.参见亚历山大·默里,《中世纪的理性与社会》(牛津,2002 年),第 25-58 页。

 14. See Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2002), pp. 25–58.

 15.参见 Thomas J. Sargent 和 François R. Velde 合著的《小额零钱的大问题》(新泽西州普林斯顿,2002 年)。

 15. See Thomas J. Sargent and François R. Velde, The Big Problem of Small Change (Princeton, NJ, 2002).

 16. Bakewell,《拉丁美洲史》,第 182 页。

 16. Bakewell, History of Latin America, p. 182.

 17. Mauricio Drelichman 和 Hans-Joachim Voth,“近代早期西班牙的制度与资源诅咒”,论文发表于 2007 年 3 月 16 日至 18 日在多伦多举行的 CIAR 制度、组织和增长计划会议。

 17. Mauricio Drelichman and Hans-Joachim Voth, ‘Institutions and the Resource Curse in Early Modern Spain’, paper presented at the CIAR Institutions, Organizations, and Growth Program Meeting in Toronto, 16–18 March 2007.

 18. Hans J. Nissen、Peter Damerow 和 Robert K. Englund,《古代簿记:古代近东经济管理的早期书写和技术》(伦敦,1993 年)。

 18. Hans J. Nissen, Peter Damerow and Robert K. Englund, Archaic Bookkeeping: Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East (London, 1993).

 19.我非常感谢大英博物馆的约翰·泰勒博士在楔形文字铭文的解读方面提供的专业指导和帮助。我还从耶鲁大学马丁·舒比克的“虚拟博物馆”中获益良多:http ://www.museumofmoney.org/babylon/ [已失效]。

 19. I am grateful to Dr John Taylor of the British Museum for his expert guidance and assistance with deciphering the cuneiform inscriptions. I also learned much from Martin Shubik’s ‘virtual museum’ at Yale: http://www.museumofmoney.org/babylon/ [inactive].

 20. Glyn Davies,《货币史:从古代到现代》(卡迪夫,1994 年);Jonathan Williams,与 Joe Cribb 和 Elizabeth Errington(编),《货币:一部历史》(伦敦,1997 年)。

 20. Glyn Davies, A History of Money: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (Cardiff, 1994); Jonathan Williams, with Joe Cribb and Elizabeth Errington (eds.), Money: A History (London, 1997).

 21.参见 Marc Van De Mieroop 的《古巴比伦乌尔的社会与企业》(柏林,1992 年)以及 Michael Hudson 和 Marc Van De Mieroop(编)的《古代近东的债务与经济复兴》第三卷(马里兰州贝塞斯达,1998 年)中的文章;Jack M. Sasson、Gary Beckman 和 Karen S. Rubinson的《古代近东文明》第三卷(伦敦,2000 年)。

 21. See Marc Van De Mieroop, Society and Enterprise in Old Babylonian Ur (Berlin, 1992) and the essays in Michael Hudson and Marc Van De Mieroop (eds.), Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East, vol. III (Bethesda, MD, 1998); Jack M. Sasson, Gary Beckman and Karen S. Rubinson, Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, vol. III (London, 2000).

 22. William N. Goetzmann,《斐波那契数列与金融革命》,NBER 工作论文 10352(2004 年 3 月)。

 22. William N. Goetzmann, ‘Fibonacci and the Financial Revolution’, NBER Working Paper 10352 (March 2004).

 23. John H. Munro,“金融革命的中世纪起源:高利贷、地租和可转让性”,《国际历史评论》,25,3(2003 年 9 月),第 505-62 页。

 23. John H. Munro, ‘The Medieval Origins of the Financial Revolution: Usury, Rentes, and Negotiability’, International History Review, 25, 3 (September 2003), pp. 505–62.

 24.关于培育犹太社区对意大利城市的好处,请参阅 Maristella Botticini,“‘仁慈’政府的故事:私人信贷市场、公共财政和犹太贷款人在文艺复兴时期意大利的作用”,《经济史杂志》,60,1(2000 年 3 月),第 164-189 页。

 24. On the advantages to Italian cities of nurturing Jewish communities, see Maristella Botticini, ‘A Tale of “Benevolent” Governments: Private Credit Markets, Public Finance, and the Role of Jewish Lenders in Renaissance Italy’, Journal of Economic History, 60, 1 (March 2000), pp. 164–189.

 25. Frederic C. Lane,《威尼斯:海上共和国》(巴尔的摩,1973 年),第 300 页。

 25. Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore, 1973), p. 300.

 26.同上,  《威尼斯银行家,1496-1533 年:存款银行早期阶段的研究》,《政治经济学杂志》,45,2(1937 年 4 月),第 187-206 页。

 26Idem, ‘Venetian Bankers, 1496–1533: A Study in the Early Stages of Deposit Banking’, Journal of Political Economy, 45, 2 (April 1937), pp. 187–206.

 27. Benjamin CI Ravid,“威尼斯犹太商人的第一份宪章”,AJS评论,1(1976),第190页及后续页。

 27. Benjamin C. I. Ravid, ‘The First Charter of the Jewish Merchants of Venice’, AJS Review, 1 (1976), pp. 190ff.

 28.同上,  《1541-1638 年威尼斯犹太商人的法律地位》,《经济史杂志》,35,1(1975 年 3 月),第 274-9 页。

 28Idem, ‘The Legal Status of the Jewish Merchants of Venice, 1541–1638’, Journal of Economic History, 35, 1 (March 1975), pp. 274–9.

 29. Rhiannon Edward,“高利贷者收取 1100 万% 的利息”,《苏格兰人报》 ,2006 年 8 月 18 日。

 29. Rhiannon Edward, ‘Loan Shark Charged 11m per cent Interest’, Scotsman, 18 August 2006.

 30.约翰·黑尔,《文艺复兴时期的欧洲文明》(伦敦,1993 年),第 83 页。

 30. John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (London, 1993), p. 83.

 31. Gene A. Brucker,《十四世纪的美第奇家族》,《Speculum》,32,1(1957 年 1 月),第 13 页。

 31. Gene A. Brucker, ‘The Medici in the Fourteenth Century’, Speculum, 32, 1 (January 1957), p. 13.

 32. John H. Munro,“金融革命的中世纪起源:高利贷、地租和可转让性”,《国际历史评论》,25,3(2003 年 9 月),第 505-62 页。

 32. John H. Munro, ‘The Medieval Origins of the Financial Revolution: Usury, Rentes, and Negotiability’, International History Review, 25, 3 (September 2003), pp. 505–62.

 33. Richard A. Goldthwaite,《美第奇银行与佛罗伦萨资本主义世界》,《过去与现在》,114(1987 年 2 月),第 3-31 页。关于美第奇家族崛起的背景,参见 Raymond de Roover,《美第奇银行的兴衰,1397-1494 年》(马萨诸塞州剑桥,1963 年),第 9-34 页。

 33. Richard A. Goldthwaite, ‘The Medici Bank and the World of Florentine Capitalism’, Past and Present, 114 (Feb. 1987), pp. 3–31. On the background to the Medicis’ rise, see Raymond de Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397–1494 (Cambridge, MA, 1963), pp. 9–34.

 34 .佛罗伦萨国家档案馆,Mediceo Avanti Principato,MAP 133、134、153。

 34. Florentine State Archives, Mediceo Avanti Principato, MAP 133, 134, 153.

 35. Franz-Josef Arlinghaus,“簿记,复式记账法”,载于 Christopher Kleinhenz(编),《中世纪意大利:百科全书》,第 1 卷(纽约,2004 年)。第一本描述该方法的书籍是 Benedetto Cotrugli 的《Il libro dell'arte di mercatura》,出版于 1458 年。

 35. Franz-Josef Arlinghaus, ‘Bookkeeping, Double-entry Bookkeeping’, in Christopher Kleinhenz (ed.), Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (New York, 2004). The first book to describe the method was Benedetto Cotrugli’s Il libro dell’arte di mercatura, published in 1458.

 36. Raymond de Roover,“美第奇银行:组织与管理”,《经济史杂志》,6,1(1946 年 5 月),第 24-52 页。

 36. Raymond de Roover, ‘The Medici Bank: Organization and Management’, Journal of Economic History, 6, 1 (May 1946), pp. 24–52.

 37 .佛罗伦萨国家档案馆,Archivio del Monte,1427 年的 Catasto。我感谢 Francesco Guidi 博士对美第奇家族论文的指导。

 37. Florentine State Archives, Archivio del Monte, Catasto of 1427. I am grateful to Dr Francesco Guidi for his guidance regarding the Medici papers.

 38. Raymond de Roover,《美第奇银行的衰落》,《经济史杂志》,7,1(1947 年 5 月),第 69-82 页。

 38. Raymond de Roover, ‘The Decline of the Medici Bank’, Journal of Economic History, 7, 1 (May 1947), pp. 69–82.

 39. Stephen Quinn 和 William Roberds,“大额钞票的大问题:阿姆斯特丹银行与中央银行的起源”,亚特兰大联邦储备银行工作论文,2005-16(2005 年 8 月)。

 39. Stephen Quinn and William Roberds, ‘The Big Problem of Large Bills: The Bank of Amsterdam and the Origins of Central Banking’, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Working Paper, 2005-16 (August 2005).

 40.例如,参见 Peter L. Rousseau 和 Richard Sylla 的《金融体系、经济增长和全球化》,载于 Michael D. Bordo、Alan M.Taylor 和 Jeffrey G. Williamson(编),《全球化的历史视角》(芝加哥/伦敦,2003 年),第 373-416 页。

 40. See for example Peter L. Rousseau and Richard Sylla, ‘Financial Systems, Economic Growth, and Globalization’, in Michael D. Bordo, Alan M. Taylor and Jeffrey G. Williamson (eds.), Globalization in Historical Perspective (Chicago / London, 2003), pp. 373–416.

 41.参见查尔斯·P·金德尔伯格,《西欧金融史》(伦敦,1984 年),第 94 页。

 41. See Charles P. Kindleberger, A Financial History of Western Europe (London, 1984), p. 94.

 42.沃尔特·白芝浩,《伦巴第街:货币市场描述》(伦敦,1873 年)。

 42. Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (London, 1873).

 43.引自 Kindleberger,《金融史》,第 87 页。

 43. Quoted in Kindleberger, Financial History, p. 87.

 44. Niall Ferguson 和 Oliver Wyman,《金融服务的演变:理解过去,展望未来》(伦敦/纽约,2007 年),第 34 页。另见第 40 页,了解全球流动性的综合指标。

 44. Niall Ferguson and Oliver Wyman, The Evolution of Financial Services: Making Sense of the Past, Preparing for the Future (London / New York, 2007), p. 34. See also p. 40 for a composite measure of global liquidity.

 45.同上,第 63 页。

 45. Ibid., p. 63.

 46.同上,第 48 页。

 46. Ibid., p. 48.

 47. http://www.bis.org/statistics/bankstats.htm。​ 

 47http://www.bis.org/statistics/bankstats.htm.

 48.罗斯柴尔德勋爵(维克多·罗斯柴尔德),《扫帚的沉思》(伦敦,1977 年),第 17 页。

 48. Lord [Victor] Rothschild, Meditations of a Broomstick (London, 1977), p. 17.

2. 人类的奴役

2. Of Human Bondage

 1. David Wessel 和 Thomas T. Vogel Jr.,“债券的神秘世界是民粹主义总统的指南和灯塔”,《华尔街日报》,1993 年 2 月 25 日,A1 页。

 1. David Wessel and Thomas T. Vogel Jr., ‘Arcane World of Bonds is Guide and Beacon to a Populist President’, Wall Street Journal, 25 February 1993, p. A1.

 2. Raymond Goldsmith,《前现代金融体系》(剑桥,1987 年),第 157 页及后续页,164-169 页。

 2. Raymond Goldsmith, Premodern Financial Systems (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 157ff., 164–9.

 3.参见 M. Veseth,《债务之山:文艺复兴时期佛罗伦萨、维多利亚时代英国和战后美国的危机与变革》(纽约/牛津,1990 年)。

 3. See M. Veseth, Mountains of Debt: Crisis and Change in Renaissance Florence, Victorian Britain and Postwar America (New York / Oxford, 1990).

 4. John H. Munro,《现代金融革命的起源:1200-1600 年西欧对教会和国家阻碍的回应》,多伦多大学工作论文,2(2001 年 7 月 6 日),第 7 页。

 4. John H. Munro, ‘The Origins of the Modern Financial Revolution: Responses to Impediments from Church and State in Western Europe, 1200–1600’, University of Toronto Working Paper, 2 (6 July 2001), p. 7.

 5. James Macdonald,《深陷债务的自由国家:民主的金融根源》(纽约,2003 年),第 81 页及后续页。

 5. James Macdonald, A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy (New York, 2003), pp. 81ff.

 6. Jean-Claude Hocquet,《城邦与市场经济》,载于 Richard Bonney(编),《经济体系与国家财政》(牛津,1995 年),第 87-91 页。

 6. Jean-Claude Hocquet, ‘City-State and Market Economy’, in Richard Bonney (ed.), Economic Systems and State Finance (Oxford, 1995), pp. 87–91.

 7. Jean-Claude Hocquet,《威尼斯》,载于 Richard Bonney(编),《欧洲财政国家的兴起,约 1200–1815 年》(牛津,1999 年),第 395 页。

 7. Jean-Claude Hocquet, ‘Venice’, in Richard Bonney (ed.), The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c. 1200–1815 (Oxford, 1999), p. 395.

 8. Frederic C. Lane,《威尼斯:海上共和国》(巴尔的摩,1973 年),第 323 页。

 8. Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore, 1973), p. 323.

 9.同上,  《威尼斯银行家,1496-1533 年:存款银行早期阶段的研究》,《政治经济学杂志》,45,2(1937 年 4 月),第 197 页及后续页。

 9Idem, ‘Venetian Bankers, 1496–1533: A Study in the Early Stages of Deposit Banking’, Journal of Political Economy, 45, 2 (April 1937), pp. 197f.

 10. Munro,《现代金融革命的起源》,第 15 页及后续页。

 10. Munro, ‘Origins of the Modern Financial Revolution’, pp. 15f.

 11. Martin Körner,“公共信用”,载于 Richard Bonney(编),《经济体系与国家财政》(牛津,1995 年),第 520 页及以下,第 524 页及以下。另见 Juan Gelabert,“卡斯蒂利亚,1504–1808 年”,载于 Richard Bonney(编),《欧洲财政国家的兴起,约 1200–1815 年》(牛津,1999 年),第 208 页及以下。

 11. Martin Körner, ‘Public Credit’, in Richard Bonney (ed.), Economic Systems and State Finance (Oxford, 1995), pp. 520f., 524f. See also Juan Gelabert, ‘Castile, 1504–1808’, in Richard Bonney (ed.), The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c. 1200–1815 (Oxford, 1999), pp. 208ff.

 12. Marjolein 't Hart,《联合省 1579–1806》,载于 Richard Bonney(编),《欧洲财政国家的兴起,约 1200–1815 年》(牛津,1999 年),第 311 页及后续页。

 12. Marjolein ’t Hart, ‘The United Provinces 1579–1806’, in Richard Bonney (ed.), The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c. 1200–1815 (Oxford, 1999), pp. 311ff.

 13. Douglass C. North 和 Barry R. Weingast,《宪法与承诺:公共选择治理制度的演变》《十七世纪的英格兰》,《经济史杂志》,49,4(1989),第 803-32 页。英国金融革命的经典记述是 PGM Dickson 的《英格兰的金融革命:1688-1756 年公共信贷发展研究》(伦敦,1967 年)。

 13. Douglass C. North and Barry R. Weingast, ‘Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England’, Journal of Economic History, 49, 4 (1989), pp. 803–32. The classic account of Britain’s financial revolution is P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (London, 1967).

 14.对旧制度下的金融危机最好的描述是 JF Bosher 的《法国财政,1770-1795》(剑桥,1970 年)。

 14. The best account of the financial crisis of the ancien régime is J. F. Bosher, French Finances, 1770–1795 (Cambridge, 1970).

 15. Larry Neal,《金融资本主义的兴起:理性时代的国际资本市场》(剑桥,1990 年)。

 15. Larry Neal, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 1990).

 16.《 汉萨德议事录》,新系列,第十八卷,第540-543页。

 16Hansard, New Series, vol. XVIII, pp. 540–43.

 17.有关详细信息,请参阅 Niall Ferguson 的《世界银行家:罗斯柴尔德家族史》(伦敦,1998 年)。另请参阅 Herbert H. Kaplan 的《内森·梅耶·罗斯柴尔德与王朝的建立:关键时期,1806-1816 年》 (斯坦福,2006 年)。

 17. For a detailed account, see Niall Ferguson, The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild (London, 1998). See also Herbert H. Kaplan, Nathan Mayer Rothschild and the Creation of a Dynasty: The Critical Years, 1806–1816 (Stanford, 2006).

 18.罗斯柴尔德档案馆,伦敦,XI/109,内森·罗斯柴尔德致其兄弟阿姆谢尔、卡尔和詹姆斯,1816 年 1 月 2 日。

 18. Rothschild Archive, London, XI/109, Nathan Rothschild to his brothers Amschel, Carl and James, 2 January 1816.

 19.罗斯柴尔德档案馆,伦敦,XI/109/2/2/156,巴黎的萨洛蒙致伦敦的内森,1815 年 10 月 29 日。

 19. Rothschild Archive, London, XI/109/2/2/156, Salomon, Paris, to Nathan, London, 29 October 1815.

 20.参见[维克多]·罗斯柴尔德勋爵,《伟人的阴影》(伦敦,1982年)。

 20. See Lord [Victor] Rothschild, The Shadow of a Great Man (London, 1982).

 21. Philip Ziegler,《第六大强国:巴林银行,1762–1929》(伦敦,1988 年),第 94 页及后续页。

 21. Philip Ziegler, The Sixth Great Power: Barings, 1762–1929 (London, 1988), pp. 94f.

 22 .海因里希·海涅 (Heinrich Heine),路德维希·伯恩 (Ludwig Börne) – ein Denkschrift: Sämtliche Schriften,卷。 IV(慕尼黑,1971 年),第 14 页。 27.

 22. Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne – ein Denkschrift: Sämtliche Schriften, vol. IV (Munich, 1971), p. 27.

 23 .海因里希·海涅(Heinrich Heine),《Lutetia》,载于《Sämtliche Schriften》,卷。 V(慕尼黑,1971 年),第 321 页,第 353 页。

 23. Heinrich Heine, ‘Lutetia’, in Sämtliche Schriften, vol. V (Munich, 1971), pp. 321ff., 353.

 24.佚名,《希伯来护身符》(伦敦,1840 年),第 28 页及后续页。

 24. Anon., The Hebrew Talisman (London 1840), pp. 28ff.

 25. Henry Iliowizi,《在隔离区:俄罗斯犹太人的故事和传说》(费城,1897 年)。

 25. Henry Iliowizi, ‘In the Pale’: Stories and Legends of the Russian Jews (Philadelphia, 1897).

 26. Richard McGregor,“中国人接受阴谋论”,《金融时报》,2007 年 9 月 26 日。

 26. Richard McGregor, ‘Chinese Buy into Conspiracy Theory’, Financial Times, 26 September 2007.

 27. Marc Flandreau 和 Juan H. Flores,《债券与品牌:19 世纪 20 年代的经验教训》,经济政策研究中心讨论稿,6420(2007 年 8 月)。

 27. Marc Flandreau and Juan H. Flores, ‘Bonds and Brands: Lessons from the 1820s’, Center for Economic Policy Research Discussion Paper, 6420 (August 2007).

 28.有关罗斯柴尔德家族以任何方式参与的所有债券发行的更完整列表,请参阅 J. Ayer 的《百年金融史,1804 年至 1904 年:伦敦罗斯柴尔德家族》(伦敦,1904 年),第 14-42 页。

 28. For a more complete list of all the bond issues with which the Rothschilds were in any way associated, see J. Ayer, A Century of Finance, 1804 to 1904: The London House of Rothschild (London, 1904), pp. 14–42.

 29.关于阿姆斯特丹,请参阅 James C. Riley 的《国际政府融资与阿姆斯特丹资本市场》(剑桥,1980 年),第 119-194 页。

 29. On Amsterdam, see James C. Riley, International Government Finance and the Amsterdam Capital Market (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 119–94.

 30. Niall Ferguson,“第一批‘欧洲债券’:罗斯柴尔德家族与神圣同盟的融资,1818-1822 年”,载于 William N. Goetzmann 和 K. Geert Rouwenhorst(编),《价值的起源:创造现代资本市场的金融创新》(牛津,2005 年),第 311-323 页。

 30. Niall Ferguson, ‘The first “Eurobonds”: The Rothschilds and the Financing of the Holy Alliance, 1818–1822’, in William N. Goetzmann and K. Geert Rouwenhorst (eds.), The Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations that Created Modern Capital Markets (Oxford, 2005), pp. 311–23.

 31 .约翰·海因里希·本德尔 (Johann Heinrich Bender),是国家邮政局的高级官员。 。 。 Als Beylageheft zum Archive für die Civilist[ische] Praxis,卷。 VIII(海德堡,1825 年),第 6 页。

 31. Johann Heinrich Bender, Über den Verkehr mit Staatspapieren in seinen Hauptrichtungen . . . Als Beylageheft zum Archiv für die Civilist[ische] Praxis, vol. VIII (Heidelberg, 1825), pp. 6ff.

 32 .海涅,路德维希·伯恩,p。 28.

 32. Heine, Ludwig Börne, p. 28.

 33.阿尔弗雷德·鲁本斯,《英犹肖像》(伦敦,1935 年),第 299 页。

 33. Alfred Rubens, Anglo-Jewish Portraits (London, 1935), p. 299.

 34. 《泰晤士报》,1821 年 1 月 15 日。 

 34The Times, 15 January 1821.

 35 .伯特兰·吉尔,《罗斯柴尔德之家的历史》,卷。 I:Des origines à 1848(日内瓦,1965 年),第 14 页。 487.

 35. Bertrand Gille, Histoire de la Maison Rothschild, vol. I: Des origines à 1848 (Geneva, 1965), p. 487.

 36. Richard Hofstadter,《从布莱恩到罗斯福的改革时代》(伦敦,1962 年),第 75 页及后续页。

 36. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform from Bryan to F.D.R. (London, 1962), pp. 75ff.

 37 . Hermann Fürst Pückler,Briefe eines Verstorbenen,编辑。海因茨·奥夫(Kupfergraben,1986),第 14 页。 7.

 37. Hermann Fürst Pückler, Briefe eines Verstorbenen, ed. Heinz Ohff (Kupfergraben, 1986), p. 7.

 38. JA Hobson,《帝国主义:一项研究》(伦敦,1902 年),第一部分,第 4 章。

 38. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London, 1902), Part I, ch. 4.

 39.例如参见道格拉斯·B·鲍尔,《财政失败与邦联战败》(厄巴纳,1991 年)。

 39. See e.g. Douglas B. Ball, Financial Failure and Confederate Defeat (Urbana, 1991).

 40. Irving Katz,《奥古斯特·贝尔蒙特:政治传记》(纽约,1968 年),尤其是第 96-99 页。

 40. Irving Katz, August Belmont: A Political Biography (New York, 1968), esp. pp. 96–9.

 41. S. Diamond(编),《美国随想录:所罗门·德·罗斯柴尔德的家书,1859-1861》(伦敦,1962 年)。

 41. S. Diamond (ed.), A Casual View of America: The Home Letters of Salomon de Rothschild, 1859–1861 (London, 1962).

 42.参见鲁道夫·格朗茨,《美国的罗斯柴尔德传奇》,《犹太社会研究》,19(1957),第3-28页。

 42. See Rudolf Glanz, ‘The Rothschild Legend in America’, Jewish Social Studies, 19 (1957), pp. 3–28.

 43. Marc D. Weidenmier,“南方邦联棉花债券市场”,《经济史探索》,37(2000),第 76-97 页。另见idem,“美国内战的转折点:来自灰背债券市场的观点”,《南方经济杂志》,68,4(2002),第 875-90 页。

 43. Marc D. Weidenmier, ‘The Market for Confederate Cotton Bonds’, Explorations in Economic History, 37 (2000), pp. 76–97. See also idem, ‘Turning Points in the U.S. Civil War: Views from the Grayback Market’, Southern Economic Journal, 68, 4 (2002), pp. 875–90.

 44.参见W.O. Henderson,《兰开夏郡棉花饥荒:1861-1865》(曼彻斯特,1934年);Thomas Ellison,《英国棉花贸易》(纽约,1968年[1886年])。

 44. See W. O. Henderson, The Lancashire Cotton Famine: 1861–1865 (Manchester, 1934); Thomas Ellison, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain (New York, 1968 [1886]).

 45. Marc D. Weidenmier,《债券上的同志:向英国领导人补贴出售南方邦联战争债务》,克莱蒙特麦肯纳学院工作论文(2003 年 2 月)。

 45. Marc D. Weidenmier, ‘Comrades in Bonds: The Subsidized Sale of Confederate War Debt to British Leaders’, Claremont McKenna College Working Paper (February 2003).

 46. Richard Roberts,《施罗德:商人和银行家》(贝辛斯托克,1992 年),第 66 页及后续页。

 46. Richard Roberts, Schroders: Merchants and Bankers (Basingstoke, 1992), pp. 66f.

 47. Richard CK Burdekin 和 Marc D. Weidenmier,“通货膨胀始终是货币现象:1864 年里士满与休斯顿的比较”,《美国经济评论》,91,5(2001 年 12 月),第 1621-30 页。

 47. Richard C. K. Burdekin and Marc D. Weidenmier, ‘Inflation is Always and Everywhere a Monetary Phenomenon: Richmond vs. Houston in 1864’, American Economic Review, 91, 5 (December 2001), pp. 1621–30.

 48. Richard Burdekin 和 Marc Weidenmier,“抑制资产价格通胀:邦联的经验,1861-1865 年”,《经济探究》,41,3(2003 年 7 月),420-32 页。参见 Eugene M. Lerner,“邦联的货币、价格和工资,1861-65 年”,《政治经济学杂志》,63,1(1955 年 2 月),20-40 页。

 48. Richard Burdekin and Marc Weidenmier, ‘Suppressing Asset Price Inflation: The Confederate Experience, 1861–1865’, Economic Inquiry, 41, 3 (July 2003), 420–32. Cf. Eugene M. Lerner, ‘Money, Prices and Wages in the Confederacy, 1861–65’, Journal of Political Economy, 63, 1 (February 1955), pp. 20–40.

 49. Frank Griffith Dawson,《第一次拉丁美洲债务危机》(伦敦,1990 年)。

 49. Frank Griffith Dawson, The First Latin American Debt Crisis (London, 1990).

 50. Kris James Mitchener 和 Marc Weidenmier,“超级制裁和主权债务偿还”,NBER 工作论文 11472 (2005)。

 50. Kris James Mitchener and Marc Weidenmier, ‘Supersanctions and Sovereign Debt Repayment’, NBER Working Paper 11472 (2005).

 51. Niall Ferguson 和 Moritz Schularick,“帝国效应:全球化第一阶段(1880-1913 年)国家风险的决定因素”,《经济史杂志》,66,2(2006 年 6 月),第 283-312 页。

 51. Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick, ‘The Empire Effect: The Determinants of Country Risk in the First Age of Globalization, 1880–1913’, Journal of Economic History, 66, 2 (June 2006), pp. 283–312.

 52. Kris James Mitchener 和 Marc Weidenmier,“帝国、公共物品和罗斯福推论”,《经济史杂志》,65(2005),第 658-92 页。

 52. Kris James Mitchener and Marc Weidenmier, ‘Empire, Public Goods, and the Roosevelt Corollary’, Journal of Economic History, 65 (2005), pp. 658–92.

 53. William Cobbett,《乡村游记》(伦敦,1985 年 [1830 年]),第 117 页。

 53. William Cobbett, Rural Rides (London, 1985 [1830]), p. 117.

 54.同上,第 34、53 页。

 54. Ibid., pp. 34, 53.

 55. M. de Cecco,《货币与帝国:国际金本位制,1890–1914》(牛津,1973 年)。

 55. M. de Cecco, Money and Empire: The International Gold Standard, 1890–1914 (Oxford, 1973).

 56. Theo Balderston,“1914-1918 年英国和德国的战争财政和通货膨胀”,《经济史评论》,42,2(1989 年 5 月),第 222-44 页。

 56. Theo Balderston, ‘War Finance and Inflation in Britain and Germany, 1914–1918’, Economic History Review, 42, 2 (May 1989), pp. 222–44.

 57.根据 BR Mitchell 的《国际历史统计:欧洲,1750-1993》(伦敦,1998 年),第 358 页及后续页计算得出。

 57. Calculated from B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Europe, 1750–1993 (London, 1998), pp. 358ff.

 58. Jay Winter 和 Jean-Louis Robert(编),《战时首都:巴黎、伦敦、柏林 1914–1919》,现代战争社会文化史研究,第 2 号(剑桥,1997 年),第 259 页。

 58. Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (eds.), Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919, Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare, No. 2 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 259.

 59. Gerald D. Feldman,《大混乱:1914-1924 年德国通货膨胀中的政治、经济和社会》(牛津/纽约,1997 年),第 211-254 页。

 59. Gerald D. Feldman, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics and Society in the German Inflation, 1914–1924 (Oxford / New York, 1997), pp. 211–54.

 60. Elias Canetti,《群众与权力》(纽约,1988 年),第 186 页。

 60. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York, 1988), p. 186.

 61.约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯,《货币改革论》,载于《凯恩斯文集》第四卷(剑桥,1971 年),第 3、29、36 页。

 61. John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform, reprinted in Collected Writings, vol. IV (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 3, 29, 36.

 62.约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯,《和平的经济后果》(伦敦,1919 年),第 220-233 页。

 62. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London, 1919), pp. 220–33.

 63. Frank Whitson Fetter,“列宁、凯恩斯和通货膨胀”,《经济学》,44,173(1977 年 2 月),第 78 页。

 63. Frank Whitson Fetter, ‘Lenin, Keynes and Inflation’, Economica, 44, 173 (February 1977), p. 78.

 64. William C. Smith,“阿根廷的民主、分配冲突和宏观经济政策制定,1983-89 年”,《美洲研究和世界事务杂志》,32,2(1990 年夏季),第 1-42 页。Rafael Di Tella 和 Ingrid Vogel,“阿根廷悖论:经济增长和民粹主义传统”,哈佛商学院案例 9-702-001(2001 年)。

 64. William C. Smith, ‘Democracy, Distributional Conflicts and Macroeconomic Policymaking in Argentina, 1983–89’, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 32, 2 (Summer 1990), pp. 1–42. Rafael Di Tella and Ingrid Vogel, ‘The Argentine Paradox: Economic Growth and Populist Tradition’, Harvard Business School Case 9-702-001 (2001).

 65.豪尔赫·路易斯·博尔赫斯,《岔路花园》,载于同作者唐纳德·A·耶茨和詹姆斯·E·欧比编,《迷宫:精选故事及其他作品》(哈蒙兹沃思,1970 年),第 50 页及后续页。

 65. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, in idem, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (Harmondsworth, 1970), pp. 50ff.

 66.弗格森,《世界银行家》,第27章。

 66. Ferguson, World’s Banker, ch. 27.

 67.更多详情请参见 Gerardo della Paolera 和 Alan M. Taylor合著的《锚定压力:阿根廷货币局与宏观经济稳定的寻求,1880-1935》(芝加哥,2001 年)。

 67. Further details in Gerardo della Paolera and Alan M. Taylor, Straining at the Anchor: The Argentine Currency Board and the Search for Macroeconomic Stability, 1880–1935 (Chicago, 2001).

 68.《不战而胜》,《经济学人》,2005 年 3 月 3 日。

 68. ‘A Victory by Default’, Economist, 3 March 2005.

 69.有关该问题的最新讨论,请参阅 Michael Tomz 的《声誉与国际合作:三个世纪以来的主权债务》(普林斯顿,2007 年)。

 69. For a recent discussion of the issue, see Michael Tomz, Reputation and International Cooperation: Sovereign Debt across Three Centuries (Princeton, 2007).

 70.关于大通货膨胀,参见 Fabrice Collard 和 Harris Dellas 的《20 世纪 70 年代的大通货膨胀》,工作论文(2003 年 10 月 1 日);Edward Nelson 的《70 年代的大通货膨胀:究竟发生了什么?》,圣路易斯联邦储备银行工作论文,2004-001(2004 年 1 月);Allan H. Meltzer 的《大通货膨胀的起源》,圣路易斯联邦储备银行评论,第 2 部分(2005 年 3 月/4 月),第 145-175 页。

 70. On the Great Inflation, see Fabrice Collard and Harris Dellas, ‘The Great Inflation of the 1970s’, Working Paper (1 October 2003); Edward Nelson, ‘The Great Inflation of the Seventies: What Really Happened?’, Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis Working Paper, 2004-001 (January 2004); Allan H. Meltzer, ‘Origins of the Great Inflation’, Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis Review, Part 2 (March / April 2005), pp. 145–75.

 71.这十一个市场分别是澳大利亚、加拿大、法国、德国、香港、爱尔兰、日本、荷兰、瑞士、英国和美国。参见 Watson Wyatt 的文章《全球养老基金资产的涨跌》:http://www.watsonwyatt.com/news/press.asp? ID=18579 。

 71. The eleven markets are Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. See Watson Wyatt, ‘Global Pension Fund Assets Rise and Fall’: http://www.watsonwyatt.com/news/press.asp?ID=18579.

 72. CNN,2000 年 7 月 9 日。

 72. CNN, 9 July 2000.

 73.美联储主席艾伦·格林斯潘向国会提交的半年货币政策报告的证词,2005 年 2 月 16 日,美国参议院银行、住房和城市事务委员会。

 73. Testimony of Chairman Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve Board’s semi-annual Monetary Policy Report to the Congress, before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, US Senate, 16 February 2005.

3. 吹泡泡

3. Blowing Bubbles

 1.有关近期对大量文献的贡献,请参阅 Timothy Guinnane、Ron Harris、Naomi R. Lamoreaux 和 Jean-Laurent Rosenthal 的《将公司置于其应有的位置》,NBER 工作论文 13109(2007 年 5 月)。

 1. For a recent contribution to a vast literature, see Timothy Guinnane, Ron Harris, Naomi R. Lamoreaux and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, ‘Putting the Corporation in its Place’, NBER Working Paper 13109 (May 2007).

 2.参见罗伯特·J·席勒,《非理性繁荣》(第2版,普林斯顿,2005年)。

 2. See especially Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (2nd edn., Princeton, 2005).

 3.参见查尔斯·P·金德尔伯格,《狂热、恐慌与崩溃:金融危机史》(第3版,纽约/奇切斯特/布里斯班/多伦多/新加坡,1996年),第12-16页。金德尔伯格深受海曼·明斯基的开创性工作的影响。关于明斯基的两篇重要论文,参见海曼·P·明斯基,《金融关系中的长波:更严重萧条中的金融因素》,《美国经济评论》,第54卷,第3期(1964年5月),第324-335页;以及同作者,《金融不稳定再探:灾难的经济学》,载于作者编,《通货膨胀、衰退与经济政策》(布莱顿,1982年),第117-161页。

 3. See Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (3rd edn., New York / Chichester / Brisbane / Toronto / Singapore, 1996), pp. 12–16. Kindleberger owed a debt to the pioneering work of Hyman Minsky. For two of his key essays, see Hyman P. Minsky, ‘Longer Waves in Financial Relations: Financial Factors in the More Severe Depressions’, American Economic Review, 54, 3 (May 1964), pp. 324–35; idem, ‘Financial Instability Revisited: The Economics of Disaster’, in idem (ed.), Inflation, Recession and Economic Policy (Brighton, 1982), pp. 117–61.

 4 .金德尔伯格,马尼亚斯,p。 14.

 4. Kindleberger, Manias, p. 14.

 5.《股票的消亡》,《商业周刊》,1979 年 8 月 13 日。

 5. ‘The Death of Equities’, Business Week, 13 August 1979.

 6. 《商业周刊》 ,1999 年 9 月 27 日,“道琼斯指数 36,000 点” 。

 6. ‘Dow 36,000’, Business Week, 27 September 1999.

 7. William N. Goetzmann 和 Philippe Jorion,“二十世纪的全球股票市场”,《金融杂志》,54,3(1999 年 6 月),第 953-80 页。

 7. William N. Goetzmann and Philippe Jorion, ‘Global Stock Markets in the Twentieth Century’, Journal of Finance, 54, 3 (June 1999), pp. 953–80.

 8. Jeremy J. Siegel,《股票长期投资:金融市场回报和长期投资策略的权威指南》(纽约,2000 年)。

 8. Jeremy J. Siegel, Stocks for the Long Run: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns and Long-Term Investment Strategies (New York, 2000).

 9. Elroy Dimson、Paul Marsh 和 Mike Staunton,《乐观主义者的胜利:101 年全球投资回报》(普林斯顿,2002 年)。

 9. Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton, Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns (Princeton, 2002).

 10. Paul Frentrop,《公司治理史 1602–2002》(布鲁塞尔,2003 年),第 49–51 页。

 10. Paul Frentrop, A History of Corporate Governance 1602–2002 (Brussels, 2003), pp. 49–51.

 11. Ronald Findlay 和 Kevin H. O'Rourke,《权力与财富:第二个千年的贸易、战争与世界经济》(普林斯顿,2007 年),第 178 页。

 11. Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton, 2007), p. 178.

 12. Frentrop,《公司治理》,第 59 页。

 12. Frentrop, Corporate Governance, p. 59.

 13.关于加尔文主义资本主义荷兰共和国的矛盾性,请参阅西蒙·沙玛的《财富的尴尬:对荷兰黄金时代文化的诠释》(纽约,1997 年 [1987 年])。

 13. On the ambivalence of the Calvinist capitalist Dutch Republic, see Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1997 [1987]).

 14. John P. Shelton,“第一份印刷股票证书:金融史上的一个重要环节”,《商业史评论》,39,3(1965 年秋季),第 396 页。

 14. John P. Shelton, ‘The First Printed Share Certificate: An Important Link in Financial History’, Business History Review, 39, 3 (Autumn 1965), p. 396.

 15. Shelton,《第一版印刷股票证书》,第 400 页及后续页。

 15. Shelton, ‘First Printed Share Certificate’, pp. 400f.

 16. Engel Sluiter,“荷兰海上力量与殖民现状,1585–1641”,《太平洋历史评论》,11,1(1942 年 3 月),第 33 页。

 16. Engel Sluiter, ‘Dutch Maritime Power and the Colonial Status Quo, 1585–1641’, Pacific Historical Review, 11, 1 (March 1942), p. 33.

 17.同上,第 34 页。

 17. Ibid., p. 34.

 18. Frentrop,《公司治理》,第 69 页及后续页。

 18. Frentrop, Corporate Governance, pp. 69f.

 19. Larry Neal,“荷兰东印度公司的风险投资股份”,载于 William N. Goetzmann 和 K. Geert Rouwenhorst(编),《价值的起源:创造现代资本市场的金融创新》(牛津,2005 年),第 167 页。

 19. Larry Neal, ‘Venture Shares of the Dutch East India Company’, in William N. Goetzmann and K. Geert Rouwenhorst (eds.), The Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations that Created Modern Capital Markets (Oxford, 2005), p. 167.

 20. Neal,《风险投资》,第 169 页。

 20. Neal, ‘Venture Shares’, p. 169.

 21. Schama,《财富的尴尬》,第 349 页。

 21. Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, p. 349.

 22.同上,第 339 页。

 22. Ibid., p. 339.

 23. Neal,《风险投资》,第 169 页。

 23. Neal, ‘Venture Shares’, p. 169.

 24. Frentrop,《公司治理》,第 85 页。

 24. Frentrop, Corporate Governance, p. 85.

 25.同上,第 95 页及以下。

 25. Ibid., pp. 95f.

 26.同上,第 103 页。参见 Neal,《风险投资股份》,第 171 页。

 26. Ibid., p. 103. Cf. Neal, ‘Venture Shares’, p. 171.

 27. Neal,《风险投资》,第 166 页。

 27. Neal, ‘Venture Shares’, p. 166.

 28. Findlay 和 O'Rourke,《权力与财富》,第 178 页。

 28. Findlay and O’Rourke, Power and Plenty, p. 178.

 29.同上,第 179-183 页。参见 Sluiter,《荷兰海上力量》,第 32 页。

 29. Ibid., pp. 179–83. Cf. Sluiter, ‘Dutch Maritime Power’, p. 32.

 30. Findlay 和 O'Rourke,《权力与财富》,第 208 页。

 30. Findlay and O’Rourke, Power and Plenty, p. 208.

 31. Femme S. Gaastra,“战争、竞争与合作:十七、十八世纪英国和荷兰东印度公司之间的关系”,载于 HV Bowen、Margarette Lincoln 和 Nigel Ribgy(编),《东印度公司的世界》(莱斯特,2002 年),第 51 页。

 31. Femme S. Gaastra, ‘War, Competition and Collaboration: Relations between the English and Dutch East India Company in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Ribgy (eds.), The Worlds of the East India Company (Leicester, 2002), p. 51.

 32. Gaastra,《战争、竞争与合作》,第 58 页。

 32. Gaastra, ‘War, Competition and Collaboration’, p. 58.

 33. Ann M. Carlos 和 Stephen Nicholas,“‘早期资本主义的巨头’:特许贸易公司作为现代跨国公司”,《商业史评论》,62,3(1988 年秋季),第 398-419 页。

 33. Ann M. Carlos and Stephen Nicholas, ‘“Giants of an Earlier Capitalism”: The Chartered Trading Companies as Modern Multinationals’, Business History Review, 62, 3 (Autumn 1988), pp. 398–419.

 34. Gaastra,《战争、竞争与合作》,第 51 页。

 34. Gaastra, ‘War, Competition and Collaboration’, p. 51.

 35. Findlay 和 O'Rourke,《权力与财富》,第 183 页。

 35. Findlay and O’Rourke, Power and Plenty, p. 183.

 36.同上,第 185 页,图 4.5。

 36. Ibid., p. 185, figure 4.5.

 37. Gaastra,《战争、竞争与合作》,第 55 页。

 37. Gaastra, ‘War, Competition and Collaboration’, p. 55.

 38. Jan de Vries 和 A. van der Woude,《第一个现代经济:荷兰经济的成功、失败和坚持,1500-1815》(剑桥,1997 年),第 396 页。

 38. Jan de Vries and A. van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 396.

 39. Andrew McFarland Davis,《法律制度的历史研究》,《经济学季刊》,1,3(1887 年 4 月),第 292 页。

 39. Andrew McFarland Davis, ‘An Historical Study of Law’s System’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1, 3 (April 1887), p. 292.

 40. H. Montgomery Hyde,《约翰·劳:一位诚实冒险家的历史》(伦敦,1969 年),第 83 页。

 40. H. Montgomery Hyde, John Law: The History of an Honest Adventurer (London, 1969), p. 83.

 41. Earl J. Hamilton,“约翰·劳制度下的巴黎物价和工资”,《经济学季刊》,51,1(1936 年 11 月),第 43 页。

 41. Earl J. Hamilton, ‘Prices and Wages at Paris under John Law’s System’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 51, 1 (November 1936), p. 43.

 42. Davis,《法律体系》,第 300 页。

 42. Davis, ‘Law’s System’, p. 300.

 43.同上,第 305 页。

 43. Ibid., p. 305.

 44. Thomas E. Kaiser,“十八世纪早期金融中的货币、专制主义和公众舆论:约翰·劳与皇家信贷之争”,《现代史杂志》,63,1(1991 年 3 月),第 6 页。

 44. Thomas E. Kaiser, ‘Money, Despotism, and Public Opinion in Early Eighteenth-Century Finance: John Law and the Debate on Royal Credit’, Journal of Modern History, 63, 1 (March 1991), p. 6.

 45. Max J. Wasserman 和 Frank H. Beach,“约翰·劳的一些被忽视的货币理论”,《美国经济评论》,24,4(1934 年 12 月),第 653 页。

 45. Max J. Wasserman and Frank H. Beach, ‘Some Neglected Monetary Theories of John Law’, American Economic Review, 24, 4 (December 1934), p. 653.

 46. James Macdonald,《深陷债务的自由国家:民主的金融根源》(纽约,2003 年),第 192 页。

 46. James Macdonald, A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy (New York, 2003), p. 192.

 47. Kaiser,《金钱》,第 12 页。

 47. Kaiser, ‘Money’, p. 12.

 48.同上,第 18 页。

 48. Ibid., p. 18.

 49. Hamilton,《价格与工资》,第 47 页。

 49. Hamilton, ‘Prices and Wages’, p. 47.

 50. Davis,《法律体系》,第 317 页。

 50. Davis, ‘Law’s System’, p. 317.

 51. Antoin E. Murphy,《约翰·劳:经济理论家和政策制定者》(牛津,1997 年),第 233 页。

 51. Antoin E. Murphy, John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker (Oxford, 1997), p. 233.

 52. Hamilton,《价格与工资》,第 55 页。

 52. Hamilton, ‘Prices and Wages’, p. 55.

 53.墨菲,约翰·劳,第 201 页。

 53. Murphy, John Law, p. 201.

 54.同上,第 190 页。

 54. Ibid., p. 190.

 55.参见拉里·尼尔,《金融资本主义的兴起:理性时代的国际资本市场》(剑桥,1990 年),第 74 页。

 55. See Larry Neal, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 1990), p. 74.

 56. Kaiser,《金钱》,第 22 页。

 56. Kaiser, ‘Money’, p. 22.

 57.有关英国投机者在 11 月和 12 月撤离巴黎的证据,请参阅 Neal 的《金融资本主义》,第 68 页。

 57. For evidence of English speculators exiting Paris in November and December, see Neal, Financial Capitalism, p. 68.

 58. Murphy,John Law,第 213 页及后续页。

 58. Murphy, John Law, pp. 213f.

 59.同上,第 205 页。

 59. Ibid., p. 205.

 60.沃恩克利夫勋爵(编),《玛丽·沃特利·蒙塔古夫人书信集》(巴黎,1837 年),第 321 页及后续页。

 60. Lord Wharncliffe (ed.), The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Paris, 1837), pp. 321f.

 61. Earl J. Hamilton,《劳里斯顿的约翰·劳:银行家、赌徒、商人、首领?》,《美国经济评论》,57,2(1967 年 5 月),第 273 页。

 61. Earl J. Hamilton, ‘John Law of Lauriston: Banker, Gamester, Merchant, Chief?’, American Economic Review, 57, 2 (May 1967), p. 273.

 62. Murphy,John Law,第 201-202 页。

 62. Murphy, John Law, pp. 201–2.

 63. Hamilton,《约翰·劳》,第 276 页。

 63. Hamilton, ‘John Law’, p. 276.

 64. Murphy,《约翰·劳》,第 239 页。参见 Hamilton,《价格与工资》,第 60 页。

 64. Murphy, John Law, p. 239. Cf. Hamilton, ‘Prices and Wages’, p. 60.

 65. Kaiser,《金钱》,第 16、20 页。

 65. Kaiser, ‘Money’, pp. 16, 20.

 66.同上,第 22 页。

 66. Ibid., p. 22.

 67.墨菲,约翰·劳,第 235 页。

 67. Murphy, John Law, p. 235.

 68.同上,第 250 页。

 68. Ibid., p. 250.

 69. Hyde,《法律》,第 159 页。

 69. Hyde, Law, p. 159.

 70. Schama,《财富的尴尬》,第 366 页及后续页。

 70. Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, pp. 366ff.

 71.同上,第 367 页及后续页。

 71. Ibid., pp. 367ff.

 72.有关对比的论述,请参阅 Neal 的《金融资本主义》,第 89-117 页;Edward Chancellor 的《魔鬼带走最后的人:金融投机史》(伦敦,1999 年),第 58-95 页。

 72. For contrasting accounts see Neal, Financial Capitalism, pp. 89–117; Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation (London, 1999), pp. 58–95.

 73. Chancellor,《魔鬼带走最后的人》,第 64 页。

 73. Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost, p. 64.

 74.同上,第 84 页。

 74. Ibid., p. 84.

 75.尼尔,《金融资本主义》,第 90、111 页及后续页。正如尼尔所观察到的,一位投资者在 1720 年初购买了南海股票,并在年底卖出,忽略了中间的泡沫,仍然能够实现 56% 的年回报率。

 75. Neal, Financial Capitalism, pp. 90, 111f. As Neal has observed, an investor who had bought South Sea stock at the beginning of 1720 and sold it at the end of the year, ignoring the intervening bubble, would still have realized a 56 per cent annual return.

 76. Julian Hoppit,《南海泡沫的神话》,皇家历史学会会刊,12(2002),第141-165页。

 76. Julian Hoppit, ‘The Myths of the South Sea Bubble’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 12 (2002), pp. 141–65.

 77. Tom Nicholas,《泡沫的麻烦》,哈佛商学院案例 N9-807-146(2007 年 2 月 28 日),第 1 页。

 77. Tom Nicholas, ‘Trouble with a Bubble’, Harvard Business School Case N9-807-146 (28 February 2007), p. 1.

 78. William L. Silber,《华盛顿关闭华尔街:1914 年大金融危机与美国货币霸权的起源》(普林斯顿,2006 年)。

 78. William L. Silber, When Washington Shut Down Wall Street: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 and the Origins of America’s Monetary Supremacy (Princeton, 2006).

 79. Niall Ferguson,“1848 年革命到第一次世界大战爆发期间的政治风险与国际债券市场”,《经济史评论》,59,1(2006 年 2 月),第 70-112 页。

 79. Niall Ferguson, ‘Political Risk and the International Bond Market between the 1848 Revolution and the Outbreak of the First World War’, Economic History Review, 59, 1 (February 2006), pp. 70–112.

 80. 《纽约时报》,  1929 年 10 月 23 日。

 80New York Times, 23 October 1929.

 81. Nicholas,《泡沫的麻烦》,第 4 页。

 81. Nicholas, ‘Trouble with a Bubble’, p. 4.

 82.同上,第 6 页。

 82. Ibid., p. 6.

 83. Chancellor,《魔鬼带走最后的人》,第 199 页及后续页。

 83. Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost, pp. 199ff.

 84.参见米尔顿·弗里德曼和安娜·J·施瓦茨合著的《美国货币史,1867-1960》(普林斯顿,1963年),第299-419页。本章,《大收缩》一书应该成为所有金融从业人员的必读书目。

 84. See Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (Princeton, 1963), pp. 299–419. This chapter, ‘The Great Contraction’, should be required reading for all financial practitioners.

 85.同上,第 309 页及以下,脚注 9。任何读过此脚注的人都会明白,为什么美联储如此迅速且大方地采取行动,确保摩根大通在 2007 年 3 月收购贝尔斯登。

 85. Ibid., pp. 309f., n. 9. Anyone who reads this footnote will understand why the Fed moved so swiftly and open-handedly to ensure that JP Morgan bought Bear Stearns in March 2007.

 86.同上,第 315 页。

 86. Ibid., p. 315.

 87.同上,第 317 页。

 87. Ibid., p. 317.

 88.同上,第 396 页。

 88. Ibid., p. 396.

 89.同上,第 325 页。

 89. Ibid., p. 325.

 90.同上,第 328 页。

 90. Ibid., p. 328.

 91.美国商务部人口普查局,《美国历史统计:殖民时代至 1970 年》(华盛顿特区,1975 年),第 1019 页。

 91. US Department of Commerce Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC, 1975), p. 1019.

 92. Barry Eichengreen,《黄金枷锁:金本位制与大萧条,1919-1939》(纽约/牛津,1992 年)。另见同作者,“重访大萧条的起源和性质”,《经济史评论》,45,2(1992 年 5 月),第 213-239 页。

 92. Barry Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939 (New York / Oxford, 1992). See also idem, ‘The Origins and Nature of the Great Slump Revisited’, Economic History Review, 45, 2 (May 1992), pp. 213–39.

 93.例如参见 Ben S. Bernanke,“大萧条的宏观经济学:比较方法”,NBER 工作论文 4814(1994 年 8 月)。

 93. See e.g. Ben S. Bernanke, ‘The Macroeconomics of the Great Depression: A Comparative Approach’, NBER Working Paper 4814 (August 1994).

 94. Hyman P. Minsky,“导言:‘它’会再次发生吗?重现”,载于同作者(编),《通货膨胀、衰退和经济政策》(布莱顿,1982 年),第 xi 页。

 94. Hyman P. Minsky, ‘Introduction: Can “It” Happen Again? A Reprise’, in idem (ed.), Inflation, Recession and Economic Policy (Brighton, 1982), p. xi.

 95.在过去的 113 年中,有 23 年该指数下跌了 10% 或更多。

 95. The index has fallen by 10 per cent or more in 23 out of 113 years.

 96.参见尼古拉斯·布雷迪、詹姆斯·C·科廷、罗伯特·G·柯比、约翰·R·奥佩尔和霍华德·M·斯坦,《总统市场机制工作组报告》,提交美国总统、财政部长和联邦储备委员会主席(华盛顿特区,1988年1月)。历史学家尤其关注与1929年的比较:参见附录八,第1-13页。

 96. See Nicholas Brady, James C. Cotting, Robert G. Kirby, John R. Opel and Howard M. Stein, Report of the Presidential Task Force on Market Mechanisms, submitted to the President of the United States, the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board (Washington, DC, January 1988). Of especial interest to the historian is the comparison with 1929: see Appendix VIII, pp. 1–13.

 97. James Dale Davidson 和 William Rees-Mogg,《大清算:20 世纪 90 年代大萧条将如何改变世界》(伦敦,1991 年)。

 97. James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, The Great Reckoning: How the World Will Change in the Depression of the 1990’s (London, 1991).

 98.有关格林斯潘本人对事件的描述,请参阅艾伦·格林斯潘著《动荡的时代:新世界的冒险》(纽约,2007 年),第 100-110 页。

 98. For Greenspan’s own version of events, see Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (New York, 2007), pp. 100–110.

 99.格林斯潘,《动荡的时代》,第166页。

 99. Greenspan, Age of Turbulence, p. 166.

 100.同上,第 167 页。

 100. Ibid., p. 167.

 101.同上,第 190-195 页。

 101. Ibid., pp. 190–5.

 102.同上,第 200 页及以下。

 102. Ibid., pp. 200f.

 103.最好的记述仍然是 Bethany McLean 和 Peter Elkind合著的《房间里最聪明的人:安然公司的惊人崛起和丑闻般的倒闭》(纽约,2003 年)。

 103. The best account remains Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron (New York, 2003).

 104.同上,第 55 页。

 104. Ibid., p. 55.

 105.请参阅 Mimi Swartz 和 Sherron Watkins 合著的《电力故障:安然公司倒闭的内幕故事》(纽约,2003 年)一书中她对事件的描述。

 105. See her own account of events in Mimi Swartz and Sherron Watkins, Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron (New York, 2003).

4. 风险的回报

4. The Return of Risk

 1. Rawle O. King,《卡特里娜飓风:保险损失和国家灾害风险融资能力》,国会研究服务报告,2008 年 1 月 31 日,表 1。

 1. Rawle O. King, ‘Hurricane Katrina: Insurance Losses and National Capacities for Financing Disaster Risks’, Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, 31 January 2008, table 1.

 2. Joseph B. Treaster,“像飓风一样的律师:对抗石棉、烟草,现在又对抗房屋保险公司”,《纽约时报》 ,2007 年 3 月 16 日。

 2. Joseph B. Treaster, ‘A Lawyer Like a Hurricane: Facing Off Against Asbestos, Tobacco and Now Home Insurers’, New York Times, 16 March 2007.

 3.详情请参阅 Richard F. Scruggs 的《卡特里娜飓风:问题与观察》,美国企业研究所-布鲁金斯司法研讨会,“美国的保险和风险分配:经济学、法律和监管”,乔治城大学法律中心,2006 年 9 月 20 日至 22 日。

 3. For details, see Richard F. Scruggs, ‘Hurricane Katrina: Issues and Observations’, American Enterprise Institute–Brookings Judicial Symposium, ‘Insurance and Risk Allocation in America: Economics, Law and Regulation’, Georgetown Law Center, 20–22 September 2006.

 4.详情请见http://www.usa.gov/Citizen/Topics/PublicSafety/Hurricane_Katrina_Recovery.shtml [已失效]、http://katrina.louisiana.gov/index.htmlhttp://www.ldi.state.la.us/HurricaneKatrina.htm [已失效]。

 4. Details from http://www.usa.gov/Citizen/Topics/PublicSafety/Hurricane_Katrina_Recovery.shtml [inactive], http://katrina.louisiana.gov/index.html and http://www.ldi.state.la.us/HurricaneKatrina.htm [inactive].

 5. Peter Lattman,“原告律师斯克鲁格斯因受贿指控被起诉”,《华尔街日报》,2007 年 11 月 29 日;Ashby Jones 和 Paulo Prada,“理查德·斯克鲁格斯认罪”,同上,2008 年 3 月 15 日。

 5. Peter Lattman, ‘Plaintiffs Lawyer Scruggs is Indicted on Bribery Charges’, Wall Street Journal, 29 November 2007; Ashby Jones and Paulo Prada, ‘Richard Scruggs Pleads Guilty’, ibid., 15 March 2008.

 6. King,《卡特里娜飓风》,第 4 页。

 6. King, ‘Hurricane Katrina’, p. 4.

 7. Naomi Klein,《休克主义:灾难资本主义的兴起》(纽约,2007 年)。

 7. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York, 2007).

 8. http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml​ ​

 8http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml.

 9.约翰·施瓦茨,《投入十亿美元后,新奥尔良仍面临风险》,《纽约时报》,2007 年 8 月 17 日。

 9. John Schwartz, ‘One Billion Dollars Later, New Orleans is Still at Risk’, New York Times, 17 August 2007.

 10. Michael Lewis,《在大自然的赌场里》,《纽约时报杂志》,2007 年 8 月 26 日。

 10. Michael Lewis, ‘In Nature’s Casino’, New York Times Magazine, 26 August 2007.

 11.美国国家安全委员会,《死亡概率是多少?》:http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/odds.htm [已失效]。关于癌症统计数据,请参阅美国国家癌症研究所,《SEER癌症统计回顾,1975-2004》,表I-17:http://srab.cancer.gov./devcan/ [已失效]。2002年至2004年间,美国人死于癌症的终生概率为21.29%,置信区间为95%。

 11. National Safety Council, ‘What are the Odds of Dying?’: http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/odds.htm [inactive]. For the cancer statistic, see the National Cancer Institute, ‘SEER Cancer Statistics Review, 1975–2004’, table I-17: http://srab.cancer.gov./devcan/ [inactive]. The precise lifetime probability of dying from cancer in the United States between 2002 and 2004 was 21.29 per cent, with a 95 per cent confidence interval.

 12. Florence Edler de Roover,“海上保险的早期例子”,《经济史杂志》,5,2(1945 年 11 月),第 172-200 页。

 12. Florence Edler de Roover, ‘Early Examples of Marine Insurance’, Journal of Economic History, 5, 2 (November 1945), pp. 172–200.

 13.同上,第 188 页及以下。

 13. Ibid., pp. 188f.

 14. AH John,“伦敦保险公司和十八世纪海上保险市场”,《经济学》,新系列,25,98(1958 年 5 月),第 130 页。

 14. A. H. John, ‘The London Assurance Company and the Marine Insurance Market of the Eighteenth Century’, Economica, New Series, 25, 98 (May 1958), p. 130.

 15. Paul A. Papayoanou,“相互依存、制度和权力平衡”,《国际安全》,20,4(1996 年春季),第 55 页。

 15. Paul A. Papayoanou, ‘Interdependence, Institutions, and the Balance of Power’, International Security, 20, 4 (Spring 1996), p. 55.

 16. Roover,《海上保险的早期例子》,第 196 页。

 16. Roover, ‘Early Examples of Marine Insurance’, p. 196.

 17. M. Greenwood,《第一张生命表》,伦敦皇家学会笔记和记录,1, 2(1938 年 10 月),第 70-72 页。

 17. M. Greenwood, ‘The First Life Table’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 1, 2 (October 1938), pp. 70–2.

 18.前一段很大程度上要归功于彼得·L·伯恩斯坦的《与神对抗:风险的非凡故事》(纽约,1996 年)。

 18. The preceding paragraph owes a great debt to Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (New York, 1996).

 19. Gregory Clark,《告别施舍:世界经济简史》(普林斯顿,2007 年)。

 19. Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton, 2007).

 20.详情请参阅 A. Ian Dunlop (编) 的《苏格兰大臣遗孀基金,1743–1993》 (爱丁堡,1992 年)中的文章。

 20. See the essays in A. Ian Dunlop (ed.), The Scottish Ministers’ Widows’ Fund, 1743–1993 (Edinburgh, 1992) for details.

 21.关键文件可在苏格兰国家档案馆的罗伯特·华莱士文稿中找到:CH/9/17/6-13。

 21. The key documents are to be found in the Robert Wallace papers, National Archives of Scotland: CH/9/17/6-13.

 22. GW Richmond,《英国的保险趋势》,《美国政治和社会科学学院年鉴》,161(1932 年 5 月),第 183 页。

 22. G. W. Richmond, ‘Insurance Tendencies in England’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 161 (May 1932), p. 183.

 23. N. Wilson,《沃尔特·斯科特的一生:阿伯茨福德的领主》(伦敦:Pimlico,2002 年),第 169-171 页。

 23. N. Wilson, A Life of Walter Scott: The Laird of Abbotsford (London: Pimlico, 2002), pp. 169–71.

 24. G. Clayton 和 WT Osborne,“保险公司和工业融资”,牛津经济论文,新系列,10,1(1958 年 2 月),第 84-97 页。

 24. G. Clayton and W. T. Osborne, ‘Insurance Companies and the Finance of Industry’, Oxford Economic Papers, New Series, 10, 1 (February 1958), pp. 84–97.

 25.《美国例外论》,《经济学人》,2006 年 8 月 10 日。

 25. ‘American Exceptionalism’, Economist, 10 August 2006.

 26. http://www.workhouses.org.uk/index.html?StMarylebone/StMarylebone.shtml​ ​

 26http://www.workhouses.org.uk/index.html?StMarylebone/StMarylebone.shtml.

 27. Lothar Gall,《俾斯麦:白色革命家》,第二卷:1879–1898 年,JA Underwood 译(伦敦,1986 年),第 129 页。

 27. Lothar Gall, Bismarck: The White Revolutionary, vol. II: 1879–1898, trans. J. A. Underwood (London, 1986), p. 129.

 28. HG Lay,《海上保险:海上保险史教科书,包括劳氏船级社的功能》(伦敦,1925 年),第 137 页。

 28. H. G. Lay, Marine Insurance: A Text Book of the History of Marine Insurance, including the Functions of Lloyd’s Register of Shipping (London, 1925), p. 137.

 29. Richard Sicotte,“经济危机和政治应对:1916 年航运法的政治经济学”,《经济史杂志》,59,4(1999 年 12 月),第 861-84 页。

 29. Richard Sicotte, ‘Economic Crisis and Political Response: The Political Economy of the Shipping Act of 1916’, Journal of Economic History, 59, 4 (December 1999), pp. 861–84.

 30.匿名,“海上保险和战争保险之间的风险分配”,《耶鲁法律杂志》,51,4(1942 年 2 月),第 674 页;C.,“海上保险中的战争风险”,《现代法律评论》,10,2(1947 年 4 月),第 211-214 页。

 30. Anon., ‘Allocation of Risk between Marine and War Insurer’, Yale Law Journal, 51, 4 (February 1942), p. 674; C., ‘War Risks in Marine Insurance’, Modern Law Review, 10, 2 (April 1947), pp. 211–14.

 31. Albert T. Lauterbach,“第一次世界大战后英国的经济复员”,《政治学季刊》,57,3(1942 年 9 月),第 376-93 页。

 31. Albert T. Lauterbach, ‘Economic Demobilization in Great Britain after the First World War’, Political Science Quarterly, 57, 3 (September 1942), pp. 376–93.

 32. Correlli Barnett,《战争审计》(伦敦,2001 年),第 31 页及后续页。

 32. Correlli Barnett, The Audit of War (London, 2001), pp. 31f.

 33. Richmond,《保险趋势》,第 185 页。

 33. Richmond, ‘Insurance Tendencies’, p. 185.

 34. Charles Davison,《9 月 1 日日本地震》,《地理杂志》,65,1(1925 年 1 月),第 42 页及后续页。

 34. Charles Davison, ‘The Japanese Earthquake of 1 September’, Geographical Journal, 65, 1 (January 1925), pp. 42f.

 35.三浦义道,《日本的保险趋势》,美国政治和社会科学学会年鉴,161(1932 年 5 月),第 215-219 页。

 35. Yoshimichi Miura, ‘Insurance Tendencies in Japan’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 161 (May 1932), pp. 215–19.

 36. Herbert H. Gowen,《日本的生活条件》,《美国政治和社会科学学会年鉴》,122(1925 年 11 月),第 163 页。

 36. Herbert H. Gowen, ‘Living Conditions in Japan’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 122 (November 1925), p. 163.

 37. Kenneth Hewitt,“地方毁灭:区域轰炸和城市地方的命运”,《美国地理学家协会年鉴》,73​​(1983),第263页。

 37. Kenneth Hewitt, ‘Place Annihilation: Area Bombing and the Fate of Urban Places’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 73 (1983), p. 263.

 38.匿名,《战争损害保险》,《耶鲁法律杂志》,51,7(1942 年 5 月),第 1160-1 页。它从 800 万份保单中收取了保费,但只支付了少量的赔偿金,却赚了 2.1 亿美元。

 38. Anon., ‘War Damage Insurance’, Yale Law Journal, 51, 7 (May 1942), pp. 1160–1. It made $210 million, having collected premiums from 8 million policies and paid out only a modest amount.

 39.金吾玉井,《日本社会保障的发展》,载于井原美沙(编),《社会政策比较:探索英国和日本的新视角》(布里斯托尔,2003 年),第 35-48 页。另见 Gregory J. Kasza,《日本的战争与福利政策》,《亚洲研究杂志》,61,2(2002 年 5 月),第 428 页。

 39. Kingo Tamai, ‘Development of Social Security in Japan’, in Misa Izuhara (ed.), Comparing Social Policies: Exploring New Perspectives in Britain and Japan (Bristol, 2003), pp. 35–48. See also Gregory J. Kasza, ‘War and Welfare Policy in Japan’, Journal of Asian Studies, 61, 2 (May 2002), p. 428.

 40.社会保障制度委员会的建议(1950 年)。

 40. Recommendation of the Council of Social Security System (1950).

 41. W. Macmahon Ball,“对日本的反思”,太平洋事务,21,1(1948 年 3 月),第 15 页及后续页。

 41. W. Macmahon Ball, ‘Reflections on Japan’, Pacific Affairs, 21, 1 (March 1948), pp. 15f.

 42. Beatrice G. Reubens,“日本的社会立法”,远东调查,18,23(1949 年 11 月 16 日),第 270 页。

 42. Beatrice G. Reubens, ‘Social Legislation in Japan’, Far Eastern Survey, 18, 23 (16 November 1949), p. 270.

 43. Keith L. Nelson,“‘战争国家’:一个概念的历史”,《太平洋历史评论》,40,2(1971 年 5 月),第 138 页及后续页。

 43. Keith L. Nelson, ‘The “Warfare State”: History of a Concept’, Pacific Historical Review, 40, 2 (May 1971), pp. 138f.

 44. Kasza,《战争与福利政策》,第 418 页及后续页。

 44. Kasza, ‘War and Welfare Policy’, pp. 418f.

 45.同上,第 423 页。

 45. Ibid., p. 423.

 46.同上,第 424 页。

 46. Ibid., p. 424.

 47.中川八弘,《日本,福利超级大国》,《日本研究杂志》,5,1(1979 年冬季),第 5-51 页。

 47. Nakagawa Yatsuhiro, ‘Japan, the Welfare Super-Power’, Journal of Japanese Studies, 5, 1 (Winter 1979), pp. 5–51.

 48.同上,第 21 页。

 48. Ibid., p. 21.

 49.同上,第 9 页。

 49. Ibid., p. 9.

 50.同上,第 18 页。

 50. Ibid., p. 18.

 51.有关比较研究,请参阅 Gregory J. Kasza 的《一个福利的世界:日本的比较视角》(伊萨卡,2006 年)以及 Neil Gilbert 和 Ailee Moon 的《分析福利努力:比较方法的评估》,《政策分析与管理杂志》,7,2(1988 年冬季),第 326-40 页。

 51. For comparative studies, see Gregory J. Kasza, One World of Welfare: Japan in Comparative Perspective (Ithaca, 2006) and Neil Gilbert and Ailee Moon, ‘Analyzing Welfare Effort: An Appraisal of Comparative Methods’, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 7, 2 (Winter 1988), pp. 326–40.

 52 .卡萨,《同一个福利世界》,第 11 页。 107.

 52. Kasza, One World of Welfare, p. 107.

 53. Peter H. Lindert,《公共部门的增长:十八世纪以来的社会支出和经济增长》(剑桥,2004 年),第一卷,表 I.2。

 53. Peter H. Lindert, Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth since the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2004), vol. I, table I.2.

 54.塚田博人,《经济全球化与公民福利国家》(奥尔德肖特/伯灵顿/新加坡/悉尼,2002 年),第 96 页。

 54. Hiroto Tsukada, Economic Globalization and the Citizens’ Welfare State (Aldershot / Burlington / Singapore / Sydney, 2002), p. 96.

 55.米尔顿·弗里德曼和安娜·J·施瓦茨,《美国货币史,1867-1960》(普林斯顿,1963 年)。

 55. Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (Princeton, 1963).

 56.米尔顿·弗里德曼和罗斯·D·弗里德曼,《两个幸运的人:回忆录》(芝加哥/伦敦,1998 年),第 399 页。

 56. Milton Friedman and Rose D. Friedman, Two Lucky People: Memoirs (Chicago / London, 1998), p. 399.

 57.同上,第 400 页。

 57. Ibid., p. 400.

 58.同上,第 593 页。

 58. Ibid., p. 593.

 59. Patricio Silva,“智利的技术官僚与政治:从芝加哥男孩到 CEIPLAN 僧侣”,《拉丁美洲研究杂志》,23,2(1991 年 5 月),第 385-410 页。

 59. Patricio Silva, ‘Technocrats and Politics in Chile: From the Chicago Boys to the CEIPLAN Monks’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 23, 2 (May 1991), pp. 385–410.

 60. Bill Jamieson,“25 年后,智利向英国传递养老金信息”,《星期日商业报》 ,2006 年 12 月 14 日。

 60. Bill Jamieson, ‘25 Years On, Chile Has a Pensions Message for Britain’, Sunday Business, 14 December 2006.

 61. Rossana Castiglioni,“紧缩政治:1973-1990 年智利军政府统治下的社会保障困境”,《拉丁美洲政治与社会》,43,4(2001 年冬季),第 39 页及后续页。

 61. Rossana Castiglioni, ‘The Politics of Retrenchment: The Quandaries of Social Protection under Military Rule in Chile, 1973–1990’, Latin American Politics and Society, 43, 4 (Winter 2001), pp. 39ff.

 62.同上,第 55 页。

 62. Ibid., p. 55.

 63. José Piñera,“赋予工人权力:智利社会保障的私有化”,《卡托杂志》,15,2-3(1995/96 年秋冬季),第 155-166 页。

 63. José Piñera, ‘Empowering Workers: The Privatization of Social Security in Chile’, Cato Journal, 15, 2–3 (Fall / Winter 1995/96), pp. 155–166.

 64.卡斯蒂廖尼,《紧缩政治》,第 40 页。

 64. Castiglioni, ‘Politics of Retrenchment’, p. 40.

 65. Robert E. Kennedy 和 Teresita Ramos,“智利:拉丁美洲之虎?”,哈佛商学院案例 9-798-092(1999 年 3 月 21 日),第 6 页。

 65. Robert E. Kennedy and Teresita Ramos, ‘Chile: The Latin American Tiger?’, Harvard Business School Case 9-798-092 (21 March 1999), p. 6.

 66. Laurence J. Kotlikoff,“养老金改革是形式战胜实质”,《经济学家之声》(2008 年 1 月),第 1-5 页。

 66. Laurence J. Kotlikoff, ‘Pension Reform as the Triumph of Form over Substance’, Economists’ Voice (January 2008), pp. 1–5.

 67. Armando Barrientos,“智利的养老金改革和养老金覆盖范围:对其他国家的启示”,拉丁美洲研究公报,15,3(1996),第312页。

 67. Armando Barrientos, ‘Pension Reform and Pension Coverage in Chile: Lessons for Other Countries’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 15, 3 (1996), p. 312.

 68.《不再贫困》,《经济学人》,2007 年 8 月 16 日。

 68. ‘Destitute No More’, Economist, 16 August 2007.

 69. Barrientos,《养老金改革》,第 309 页及后续页。另见 Raul Madrid,《拉丁美洲养老金私有化的政治与经济》,《拉丁美洲研究评论》,37,2(2002 年),第 159-182 页。

 69. Barrientos, ‘Pension Reform’, pp. 309f. See also Raul Madrid, ‘The Politics and Economics of Pension Privatization in Latin America’, Latin American Research Review, 37, 2 (2002), pp. 159–82.

 70.所有数据均为 2004 年数据,这是世界银行《世界发展指标》数据库中可获得的最新比较数据。

 70. All figures are for 2004, the latest comparative data available from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators database.

 71.在此,我要感谢劳伦斯·J·科特利科夫和斯科特·伯恩斯合著的《即将到来的世代风暴:关于美国经济未来你需要知道的一切》(剑桥,2005年)。另见彼得·G·彼得森的《资金耗尽:民主党和共和党如何让我们的未来破产以及美国人可以做些什么》(纽约,2005年)。

 71. I am indebted here to Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns, The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know about America’s Economic Future (Cambridge, 2005). See also Peter G. Peterson, Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do about It (New York, 2005).

 72. Ruth Helman、Craig Copeland 和 Jack VanDerhei,“我们当中会有更多人永远工作吗?2006 年退休信心调查”,员工福利研究所简报,292(2006 年 4 月)。

 72. Ruth Helman, Craig Copeland and Jack VanDerhei, ‘Will More of Us Be Working Forever? The 2006 Retirement Confidence Survey’, Employee Benefit Research Institute Issue Brief, 292 (April 2006).

 73.美国代理审计长吉恩·L·多达罗在2008年马里兰州注册会计师协会政府和非营利组织会议上发表题为“在不断变化的环境中努力提高问责制”的讲话(2008年4月18日)。

 73. Gene L. Dodaro, Acting Comptroller General of the United States, ‘Working to Improve Accountability in an Evolving Environment’, address to the 2008 Maryland Association of CPAs’ Government and Not-for-profit Conference (18 April 2008).

 74. James Brooke,《艰难推销:日本社会保障》,《纽约时报》,2004 年 5 月 6 日。

 74. James Brooke, ‘A Tough Sell: Japanese Social Security’, New York Times, 6 May 2004.

 75.参见 Mutsuko Takahashi,《日本福利社会的兴起》(Aldershot / Brookfield / Hong Kong / Singapore / Sydney,1997 年),第 185 页及后续页。另见 Kasza,《一个福利的世界》,第 179-182 页。

 75. See Mutsuko Takahashi, The Emergence of Welfare Society in Japan (Aldershot / Brookfield / Hong Kong / Singapore / Sydney, 1997), pp. 185f. See also Kasza, One World of Welfare, pp. 179–82.

 76. Alex Kerr,《狗与恶魔:现代日本的衰落》(伦敦,2001 年),第 261-266 页。

 76. Alex Kerr, Dogs and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan (London, 2001), pp. 261–66.

 77. Gavan McCormack,《附庸国:美国拥抱下的日本》(伦敦,2007 年),第 45-69 页。

 77. Gavan McCormack, Client State: Japan in the American Embrace (London, 2007), pp. 45–69.

 78. Lisa Haines,“世界最大养老基金超过 10 万亿美元”,《金融新闻》,2007 年 9 月 5 日。

 78. Lisa Haines, ‘World’s Largest Pension Funds Top $10 Trillion’, Financial News, 5 September 2007.

 79.《危险的生活》,《经济学人》,2004 年 1 月 22 日。

 79. ‘Living Dangerously’, Economist, 22 January 2004.

 80. Philip Bobbitt,《恐怖与同意:二十一世纪的战争》(纽约,2008 年),尤其是第 98-179 页。

 80. Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century (New York, 2008), esp. pp. 98–179.

 81. Suleiman abu Gheith,引自同上,第 119 页。

 81. Suleiman abu Gheith, quoted in ibid., p. 119.

 82. Graham Allison,“是时候埋葬一个危险的遗产了,第 1 部分”,耶鲁全球,2008 年 3 月 14 日。参见idem《核恐怖主义:终极可预防的灾难》(马萨诸塞州剑桥,2004 年)。

 82. Graham Allison, ‘Time to Bury a Dangerous Legacy, Part 1’, Yale Global, 14 March 2008. Cf. idem, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe (Cambridge, MA, 2004).

 83. Michael D. Intriligator 和 Abdullah Toukan,“恐怖主义和大规模杀伤性武器”,载于 Peter Katona、Michael D. Intriligator 和 John P. Sullivan(编),《打击恐怖主义和大规模杀伤性武器:建立全球反恐网络》(纽约,2006 年),表 4.1A。

 83. Michael D. Intriligator and Abdullah Toukan, ‘Terrorism and Weapons of Mass Destruction’, in Peter Katona, Michael D. Intriligator and John P. Sullivan (eds.), Countering Terrorism and WMD: Creating a Global Counter-terrorism Network (New York, 2006), table 4.1A.

 84.参见政府间气候变化专门委员会(IPCC)《2007 年气候变化:综合报告》(瓦伦西亚,2007 年)。

 84. See IPCC, Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report (Valencia, 2007).

 85. Robert Looney,《9/11 袭击给美国带来的经济损失》,当代冲突战略洞察中心(2002 年 8 月 5 日)。

 85. Robert Looney, ‘Economic Costs to the United States Stemming from the 9/11 Attacks’, Center for Contemporary Conflict Strategic Insight (5 August 2002).

 86. Robert E. Litan,“分担和减少未来特大灾难的金融风险”,布鲁金斯经济政策问题,4(2006 年 3 月)。

 86. Robert E. Litan, ‘Sharing and Reducing the Financial Risks of Future Mega-Catastrophes’, Brookings Issues in Economic Policy, 4 (March 2006).

 87. William Hutchings,“Citadel 构建多元化业务”,《金融新闻》,2007 年 10 月 3 日。

 87. William Hutchings, ‘Citadel Builds a Diverse Business’, Financial News, 3 October 2007.

 88. Marcia Vickers,“对冲基金超级明星”,《财富》杂志,2007 年 4 月 3 日。

 88. Marcia Vickers, ‘A Hedge Fund Superstar’, Fortune, 3 April 2007.

 89. Joseph Santos,《美国期货交易史》,南达科他大学硕士论文,无日期

 89. Joseph Santos, ‘A History of Futures Trading in the United States’, South Dakota University MS, n.d.

5. 安全无虞

5. Safe as Houses

 1. Philip E. Orbanes,《大富翁:世界上最著名的游戏——以及它是如何发展成这样的》(纽约,2006 年),第 10-71 页。

 1. Philip E. Orbanes, Monopoly: The World’s Most Famous Game – And How It Got That Way (New York, 2006), pp. 10–71.

 2.同上,第 50 页。

 2. Ibid., p. 50.

 3.同上,第 86 页及以下。

 3. Ibid., pp. 86f.

 4.同上,第 90 页。

 4. Ibid., p. 90.

 5. Robert J. Shiller,“了解房价和房屋所有权的最新趋势”,在堪萨斯城联邦储备银行杰克逊霍尔会议上发表的论文(2007 年 8 月)。

 5. Robert J. Shiller, ‘Understanding Recent Trends in House Prices and Home Ownership’, paper presented at Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s Jackson Hole Conference (August 2007).

 6. http://www.canongate.net/WhoOwnsBritain/DoTheMathsOnLand  [已失效]所有权

 6http://www.canongate.net/WhoOwnsBritain/DoTheMathsOnLand [inactive] Ownership.

 7. David Cannadine,《贵族的方方面面:现代英国的辉煌与衰落》(纽黑文,1994 年),第 170 页。

 7. David Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain (New Haven, 1994), p. 170.

 8.我感谢 Gregory Clark 提供这些统计数据。

 8. I am grateful to Gregory Clark for these statistics.

 9. Frederick B. Heath,《十九世纪的格伦维尔家族:商业联盟的出现》,《亨廷顿图书馆季刊》,25,1(1961 年 11 月),第 29 页。

 9. Frederick B. Heath, ‘The Grenvilles, in the Nineteenth Century: The Emergence of Commercial Affiliations’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 25, 1 (November 1961), p. 29.

 10. Heath,《格伦维尔家族》,第 32 页及后续页。

 10. Heath, ‘Grenvilles’, pp. 32f.

 11.同上,第 35 页。

 11. Ibid., p. 35.

 12. David Spring 和 Eileen Spring,《格伦维尔家族的衰落》,《亨廷顿图书馆季刊》,19,2(1956 年 2 月),第 166 页。

 12. David Spring and Eileen Spring, ‘The Fall of the Grenvilles’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 19, 2 (February 1956), p. 166.

 13.同上,第 177 页及以下。

 13. Ibid., pp. 177f.

 14.详情见 Spring 和 Spring 的《格伦维尔家族的衰落》,第 169-174 页。

 14. Details in Spring and Spring, ‘Fall of the Grenvilles’, pp. 169–74.

 15.同上,第 185 页。

 15. Ibid., p. 185.

 16. Heath,《格伦维尔家族》,第 39 页。

 16. Heath, ‘Grenvilles’, p. 39.

 17. Spring and Spring,《格伦维尔家族的衰落》,第 183 页。

 17. Spring and Spring, ‘Fall of the Grenvilles’, p. 183.

 18. Heath,《格伦维尔家族》,第 40 页。

 18. Heath, ‘Grenvilles’, p. 40.

 19.同上,第 46 页。

 19. Ibid., p. 46.

 20.本·伯南克,《住房、住房金融和货币政策》,在堪萨斯城联邦储备银行杰克逊霍尔会议上的演讲(2007 年 8 月 31 日)。

 20. Ben Bernanke, ‘Housing, Housing Finance, and Monetary Policy’, speech at the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank’s Jackson Hole Conference (31 August 2007).

 21. Louis Hyman,《债务国度:消费信贷如何构建战后美国》,未发表的博士论文(哈佛大学,2007 年),第 1 章。

 21. Louis Hyman, ‘Debtor Nation: How Consumer Credit Built Postwar America’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (Harvard University, 2007), ch. 1.

 22. Edward E. Leamer,“住房是商业周期”,在堪萨斯城联邦储备银行杰克逊霍尔会议上发表的论文(2007 年 8 月)。

 22. Edward E. Leamer, ‘Housing is the Business Cycle’, paper presented at Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s Jackson Hole Conference (August 2007).

 23. Saronne Rubyan-Ling,《迭戈·里维拉的底特律壁画》,《今日历史》,46,4(1996 年 4 月),第 34-38 页。

 23. Saronne Rubyan-Ling, ‘The Detroit Murals of Diego Rivera’, History Today, 46, 4 (April 1996), pp. 34–8.

 24. Donald Lochbiler,《花园球场之战》,《底特律新闻》 ,1997 年 7 月 15 日。

 24. Donald Lochbiler, ‘Battle of the Garden Court’, Detroit News, 15 July 1997.

 25. Hyman,《债务国》,第 2 章。

 25. Hyman, ‘Debtor Nation’, ch. 2.

 26. Thomas J. Sugrue,《城市危机的起源:战后底特律的种族和不平等》(普林斯顿,1996 年),第 64 页。

 26. Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, 1996), p. 64.

 27.同上,第 38-43 页。

 27. Ibid., pp. 38–43.

 28. Hyman,《债务国》,第 5 章。

 28. Hyman, ‘Debtor Nation’, ch. 5.

 29. Sugrue,《城市危机的起源》,第 259 页。

 29. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, p. 259.

 30.关于底特律最近的一个案例,请参阅 Ben Lefebvre,“司法部指控底特律银行贷款存在偏见”,《纽约时报》 ,2004 年 5 月 20 日。

 30. For a recent case in Detroit, see Ben Lefebvre, ‘Justice Dept. Accuses Detroit Bank of Bias in Lending’, New York Times, 20 May 2004.

 31. Glen O'Hara,《从梦想到幻灭:20 世纪 60 年代英国的经济和社会规划》(贝辛斯托克,2007 年),第 5 章。

 31. Glen O’Hara, From Dreams to Disillusionment: Economic and Social Planning in 1960s Britain (Basingstoke, 2007), ch. 5.

 32.伯南克,《住房、住房金融和货币政策》。另见罗杰·洛温斯坦,《谁需要抵押贷款利息扣除?》,《纽约时报杂志》,2006 年 3 月 5 日。

 32. Bernanke, ‘Housing, Housing Finance, and Monetary Policy’. See also Roger Loewenstein, ‘Who Needs the Mortgage-Interest Deduction?’, New York Times Magazine, 5 March 2006.

 33. Nigel Lawson,《唐宁街11号的视角:一位托利党激进分子的回忆录》(伦敦,1992年),第821页。

 33. Nigel Lawson, The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical (London, 1992), p. 821.

 34.生活在英国:2002 年家庭综合调查(伦敦,2003 年),第 30 页:http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp? id  =821 。

 34Living in Britain: General Household Survey 2002 (London, 2003), p. 30: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=821.

 35. Ned Eichler,“20 世纪 80 年代的住房建设:危机还是转型?”,《美国政治和社会科学学会年鉴》,465(1983 年 1 月),第 37 页。

 35. Ned Eichler, ‘Homebuilding in the 1980s: Crisis or Transition?’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 465 (January 1983), p. 37.

 36. Maureen O'Hara,“财产权与金融公司”,《法律与经济学杂志》,24(1981 年 10 月),第 317-32 页。

 36. Maureen O’Hara, ‘Property Rights and the Financial Firm’, Journal of Law and Economics, 24 (October 1981), pp. 317–32.

 37. Eichler,《房屋建造》,第 40 页。另见 Henry N. Pontell 和 Kitty Calavita,《储蓄贷款丑闻中的白领犯罪》,《美国政治和社会科学学会年鉴》,525(1993 年 1 月),第 31-45 页;Marcia Millon Cornett 和 Hassan Tehranian,《对 1982 年 Garn-St Germain 存款机构法案对商业银行和储蓄贷款机构的影响的考察》,《金融杂志》,45,1(1990 年 3 月),第 95-111 页。

 37. Eichler, ‘Homebuilding’, p. 40. See also Henry N. Pontell and Kitty Calavita, ‘White-Collar Crime in the Savings and Loan Scandal’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 525 (January 1993), pp. 31–45; Marcia Millon Cornett and Hassan Tehranian, ‘An Examination of the Impact of the Garn-St Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982 on Commercial Banks and Savings and Loans’, Journal of Finance, 45, 1 (March 1990), pp. 95–111.

 38. Henry N. Pontell 和 Kitty Calavita,“储蓄贷款行业”,犯罪与司法,18(1993),第 211 页。

 38. Henry N. Pontell and Kitty Calavita, ‘The Savings and Loan Industry’, Crime and Justice, 18 (1993), p. 211.

 39.同上,第 208 页及以下。

 39. Ibid., pp. 208f.

 40. F. Stevens Redburn,“储贷灾难的深层结构”,《政治学与政治》,24,3(1991 年 9 月),第 439 页。

 40. F. Stevens Redburn, ‘The Deeper Structure of the Savings and Loan Disaster’, Political Science and Politics, 24, 3 (September 1991), p. 439.

 41. Pontell 和 Calavita,《白领犯罪》,第 37 页。

 41. Pontell and Calavita, ‘White-Collar Crime’, p. 37.

 42. Allen Pusey,《快速致富与欺诈》,《纽约时报》,1989 年 4 月 23 日。

 42. Allen Pusey, ‘Fast Money and Fraud’, New York Times, 23 April 1989.

 43. K. Calavita、R. Tillman 和 HN Pontell,“储蓄贷款危机、金融犯罪与国家”,《社会学年鉴》,23(1997 年),第 23 页。

 43. K. Calavita, R. Tillman, and H. N. Pontell, ‘The Savings and Loan Debacle, Financial Crime and the State’, Annual Review of Sociology, 23 (1997), p. 23.

 44. Pontell 和 Calavita,《储蓄和贷款行业》,第 215 页。

 44. Pontell and Calavita, ‘Savings and Loan Industry’, p. 215.

 45. Calavita、Tillman 和 Pontell,《储蓄贷款惨败》,第 24 页。

 45. Calavita, Tillman and Pontell, ‘Savings and Loan Debacle’, p. 24.

 46. Allen Pusey 和 Christi Harlan,“银行家从 I-30 交易中获利”,《达拉斯晨报》,1986 年 1 月 29 日。

 46. Allen Pusey and Christi Harlan, ‘Bankers Shared in Profits from I–30 Deals’, Dallas Morning News, 29 January 1986.

 47. Allen Pusey 和 Christi Harlan,“I-30 房地产交易:一台‘虚拟的赚钱机器’”,《达拉斯晨报》,1986 年 1 月 26 日。

 47. Allen Pusey and Christi Harlan, ‘I–30 Real Estate Deals: A “Virtual Money Machine”’, Dallas Morning News, 26 January 1986.

 48. Pusey,《快速致富与欺诈》。

 48. Pusey, ‘Fast Money and Fraud’.

 49. Pontell 和 Calavita,《白领犯罪》,第 43 页。另见 Kitty Calavita 和 Henry N. Pontell,《国家与白领犯罪:拯救储蓄贷款》,《法律协会评论》,28,2(1994 年),第 297-324 页。

 49. Pontell and Calavita, ‘White-Collar Crime’, p. 43. See also Kitty Calavita and Henry N. Pontell, ‘The State and White-Collar Crime: Saving the Savings and Loans’, Law Society Review, 28, 2 (1994), pp. 297–324.

 50.最初人们担心损失会更高。1990 年,美国总审计署预测损失可能高达 5000 亿美元。其他人估计损失可能达到一万亿美元或更多:Pontell 和 Calavita,《储蓄贷款行业》,第 203 页。

 50. The losses were initially feared to be higher. In 1990 the General Accounting Office foresaw costs of up to $500 billion. Others estimated costs of a trillion dollars or more: Pontell and Calavita, ‘Savings and Loan Industry’, p. 203.

 51.有关生动的描述,请参阅迈克尔·刘易斯的《说谎者的扑克牌》(伦敦,1989 年),第 78-124 页。

 51. For a vivid account, see Michael Lewis, Liar’s Poker (London, 1989), pp. 78–124.

 52.伯南克,《住房、住房金融和货币政策》。

 52. Bernanke, ‘Housing, Housing Finance, and Monetary Policy’.

 53.我感谢 Joseph Barillari 对这些计算的帮助。Morris A. Davis、Andreas Lehnert 和 Robert F. Martin,“自住住房总量的租金价格比”,工作论文(2007 年 12 月)。

 53. I am grateful to Joseph Barillari for his assistance with these calculations. Morris A. Davis, Andreas Lehnert and Robert F. Martin, ‘The Rent–Price Ratio for the Aggregate Stock of Owner-Occupied Housing’, Working paper (December 2007).

 54.席勒,《近期房价趋势》。

 54. Shiller, ‘Recent Trends in House Prices’.

 55. Carmen M. Reinhart 和 Kenneth S. Rogoff,“2007 年次贷危机真的如此不同吗?国际历史比较”,工作论文草稿(2008 年 1 月 14 日)。

 55. Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, ‘Is the 2007 Sub-Prime Financial Crisis So Different? An International Historical Comparison’, Draft Working Paper (14 January 2008).

 56.马克·怀特豪斯,《债务炸弹:次贷危机内幕》,《华尔街日报》 ,2007 年 5 月 30 日,A1 页。

 56. Mark Whitehouse, ‘Debt Bomb: Inside the “Subprime” Mortgage Debacle’, Wall Street Journal, 30 May 2007, p. A1.

 57.参见 Kimberly Blanton,“关于种族和次贷的‘确凿证据’”,《波士顿环球报》 ,2007 年 3 月 16 日。

 57. See Kimberly Blanton, ‘A “Smoking Gun” on Race, Subprime Loans’, Boston Globe, 16 March 2007.

 58.《美国房地产泡沫破裂引发互相指责》,《华尔街日报》,2008 年 3 月 19 日。另见 David Wessel,《房地产泡沫破裂带来启示》,《华尔街日报》,2008 年 4 月 10 日。

 58. ‘U.S. Housing Bust Fuels Blame Game’, Wall Street Journal, 19 March 2008. See also David Wessel, ‘Housing Bust Offers Insights’, Wall Street Journal, 10 April 2008.

 59. Henry Louis Gates Jr.,《四十英亩土地和财富差距》,《纽约时报》,2007 年 11 月 18 日。

 59. Henry Louis Gates Jr., ‘Forty Acres and a Gap in Wealth’, New York Times, 18 November 2007.

 60. Andy Meek,《弗雷泽止赎案曝光》,《每日新闻》 ,2006 年 9 月 21 日。

 60. Andy Meek, ‘Frayser Foreclosures Revealed’, Daily News, 21 September 2006.

 61. http://www.responsiblelending.org/page.jsp?itemID=32032031​ ​

 61http://www.responsiblelending.org/page.jsp?itemID=32032031.

 62.瑞士信贷,《止赎趋势——一个令人警醒的现实》,固定收益研究(2008 年 4 月 23 日)。

 62. Credit Suisse, ‘Foreclosure Trends – A Sobering Reality’, Fixed Income Research (23 April 2008).

 63.参见 Prabha Natarajan,“房利美和房地美可能会损害美国信贷”,《华尔街日报》,2008 年 4 月 15 日。

 63. See Prabha Natarajan, ‘Fannie, Freddie Could Hurt U.S. Credit’, Wall Street Journal, 15 April 2008.

 64. 2007 年总统经济报告,表 B-77 和 B-76:http://www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/ [ 已失效]。

 64Economic Report of the President 2007, tables B-77 and B-76: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/ [inactive].

 65. George Magnus,《管理明斯基》,瑞银研究报告,2008 年 3 月 27 日。

 65. George Magnus, ‘Managing Minsky’, UBS research paper, 27 March 2008.

 66. Hernando de Soto,《资本的奥秘:为什么资本主义在西方取得成功,在其他地方失败》(伦敦,2001 年)。

 66. Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (London, 2001).

 67.同上,  《访谈:土地与自由》,《新科学家》,2002 年 4 月 27 日。

 67Idem, ‘Interview: Land and Freedom’, New Scientist, 27 April 2002.

 68.同上《另一条路》( 纽约,1989 年)。

 68Idem, The Other Path (New York, 1989).

 69. Rafael Di Tella、Sebastian Galiani 和 Ernesto Schargrodsky,“信念的形成:从向非法占地者分配土地所有权中的证据”,《经济学季刊》,122,1(2007 年 2 月),第 209-41 页。

 69. Rafael Di Tella, Sebastian Galiani and Ernesto Schargrodsky, ‘The Formation of Beliefs: Evidence from the Allocation of Land Titles to Squatters’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 122, 1 (February 2007), pp. 209–41.

 70.《资本之谜愈发深化》,《经济学人》,2006 年 8 月 26 日。

 70. ‘The Mystery of Capital Deepens’, The Economist, 26 August 2006.

 71.参见John Gravois,《德索托的错觉》,Slate,2005年1月29日:http://state.msn.com/id/2112792/

 71. See John Gravois, ‘The De Soto Delusion’, Slate, 29 January 2005: http://state.msn.com/id/2112792/.

 72.全部利润都转移到为应对紧急情况而设立的康复基金中,作为交换,公司可以免缴企业所得税。

 72. The entire profit is transferred to a Rehabilitation Fund created to cope with emergency situations, in return for an exemption from corporate income tax.

 73. Connie Bruck,《百万富翁》,《纽约客》 ,2006 年 10 月 30 日,第 62-73 页。

 73. Connie Bruck, ‘Millions for Millions’, New Yorker, 30 October 2006, pp. 62–73.

 74.席勒,《近期房价趋势》。

 74. Shiller, ‘Recent Trends in House Prices’.

 75. Edward L. Glaeser 和 Joseph Gyourko,“住房动态”,NBER 工作论文 12787(修订版,2007 年 3 月 31 日)。

 75. Edward L. Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko, ‘Housing Dynamics’, NBER Working Paper 12787 (revised version, 31 March 2007).

 76. Robert J. Shiller,《新金融秩序:21 世纪的风险》(普林斯顿,2003 年)。

 76. Robert J. Shiller, The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century (Princeton, 2003).

6. 从帝国到奇美利加

6. From Empire to Chimerica

 1. Dominic Wilson 和 Roopa Purushothaman,《与金砖国家共筑梦想:通往 2050 年之路》,高盛全球经济报告,第 99 页(2003 年 10 月 1 日)。另见 Jim O'Neill,《构建更美好的全球经济金砖国家》,高盛全球经济报告,第 66 页(2001 年 11 月 30 日);Jim O'Neill、Dominic Wilson、Roopa Purushothaman 和 Anna Stupnytska,《金砖国家有多稳固?》,高盛全球经济报告,第 134 页(2005 年 12 月 1 日)。

 1. Dominic Wilson and Roopa Purushothaman, ‘Dreaming with the BRICs: The Path to 2050’, Goldman Sachs Global Economics Paper, 99 (1 October 2003). See also Jim O’Neill, ‘Building Better Global Economic BRICs’, Goldman Sachs Global Economics Paper, 66 (30 November 2001); Jim O’Neill, Dominic Wilson, Roopa Purushothaman and Anna Stupnytska, ‘How Solid are the BRICs?’, Goldman Sachs Global Economics Paper, 134 (1 December 2005).

 2. Dominic Wilson 和 Anna Stupnytska,“N-11:不仅仅是一个缩写”,高盛全球经济论文,153(2007 年 3 月 28 日)。

 2. Dominic Wilson and Anna Stupnytska, ‘The N-11: More than an Acronym’, Goldman Sachs Global Economics Paper, 153 (28 March 2007).

 3.高盛全球经济集团,《金砖国家及其他》(伦敦,2007 年),尤其是第 45-72 页、103-8 页。

 3. Goldman Sachs Global Economics Group, BRICs and Beyond (London, 2007), esp. pp. 45–72, 103–8.

 4.肯尼斯·波默兰茨在其著作《大分流:中国、欧洲与现代世界经济的形成》(普林斯顿/牛津,2000 年)中提出了这一论点。若要了解对 1700 年中国地位更为怀疑的观点,请参阅安格斯·麦迪逊的著作《世界经济:千年视角》(巴黎,2001 年)。

 4. The argument is made in Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton / Oxford, 2000). For a more sceptical view of China’s position in 1700, see inter alia Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris, 2001).

 5.根据麦迪逊《世界经济》表 B-21中的人均国内生产总值估计计算得出。

 5. Calculated from the estimates for per capita gross domestic product in Maddison, World Economy, table B-21.

 6. Pomeranz,《大分歧》

 6. Pomeranz, Great Divergence.

 7.近期关于这一主题的重要著作包括:埃里克·琼斯的《欧洲奇迹:欧洲和亚洲历史上的环境、经济和地缘政治》(剑桥,1981 年);大卫·S·兰德斯的《国家的财富与贫困:为什么有些国家如此富有,有些国家如此贫穷》(纽约,1998 年);乔尔·莫基尔的《雅典娜的礼物:知识经济的历史起源》(普林斯顿,2002 年);格雷戈里·克拉克的《告别施舍:世界简史》(普林斯顿,2007 年)。

 7. Among the most important recent works on the subject are Eric Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge, 1981); David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York, 1998); Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, 2002); Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton, 2007).

 8. William N. Goetzmann,《斐波那契数列与金融革命》,NBER 工作论文 10352(2004 年 3 月)。

 8. William N. Goetzmann, ‘Fibonacci and the Financial Revolution’, NBER Working Paper 10352 (March 2004).

 9. William N. Goetzmann、Andrey D. Ukhov 和 Ning Zhu,“中国与世界金融市场,1870-1930 年:从历史全球化中汲取的现代教训”,《经济史评论》(即将出版)。

 9. William N. Goetzmann, Andrey D. Ukhov and Ning Zhu, ‘China and the World Financial Markets, 1870–1930: Modern Lessons from Historical Globalization’, Economic History Review (forthcoming).

 10. Nicholas Crafts,《二十世纪的全球化与增长》,国际货币基金组织工作论文,00/44(2000 年 3 月)。另见 Richard E. Baldwin 和 Philippe Martin,《全球化的两波浪潮:表面上的相似之处,根本的差异》,NBER 工作论文 6904(1999 年 1 月)。

 10. Nicholas Crafts, ‘Globalisation and Growth in the Twentieth Century’, International Monetary Fund Working Paper, 00/44 (March 2000). See also Richard E. Baldwin and Philippe Martin, ‘Two Waves of Globalization: Superficial Similarities, Fundamental Differences’, NBER Working Paper 6904 (January 1999).

 11. Barry R. Chiswick 和 Timothy J. Hatton,“国际移民与劳动力市场的融合”,载于 Michael D. Bordo、Alan M. Taylor 和 Jeffrey G. Williamson(编),《全球化的历史视角》(芝加哥,2003 年),第 65-120 页。

 11. Barry R. Chiswick and Timothy J. Hatton, ‘International Migration and the Integration of Labor Markets’, in Michael D. Bordo, Alan M. Taylor and Jeffrey G. Williamson (eds.), Globalization in Historical Perspective (Chicago, 2003), pp. 65–120.

 12. Maurice Obstfeld 和 Alan M. Taylor,“全球化与资本市场”,载于 Michael D. Bordo、Alan M. Taylor 和 Jeffrey G. Williamson(编),《历史视角下的全球化》(芝加哥,2003 年),第 173 页及后续页。

 12. Maurice Obstfeld and Alan M. Taylor, ‘Globalization and Capital Markets’, in Michael D. Bordo, Alan M. Taylor and Jeffrey G. Williamson (eds.), Globalization in Historical Perspective (Chicago, 2003), pp. 173f.

 13.克拉克,《告别》,第13、14章。

 13. Clark, Farewell, chs. 13, 14.

 14. David M. Rowe,“自由主义的悲剧:全球化如何导致第一次世界大战”,《安全研究》,14,3(2005 年春季),第 1-41 页。

 14. David M. Rowe, ‘The Tragedy of Liberalism: How Globalization Caused the First World War’, Security Studies, 14, 3 (Spring 2005), pp. 1–41.

 15.例如,参见 Fareed Zakaria 的《后美国世界》(纽约,2008 年)和 Parag Khanna 的《第二世界:新全球秩序中的帝国与影响力》(伦敦,2008 年)。

 15. See for example Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (New York, 2008) and Parag Khanna, The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (London, 2008).

 16.吉姆·罗杰斯,《中国牛市:在世界最大的市场中盈利投资》(纽约,2007 年)。

 16. Jim Rogers, A Bull in China: Investing Profitably in the World’s Greatest Market (New York, 2007).

 17. Robert Blake,《怡和洋行:远东商人》(伦敦,1999 年),第 91 页。另见 Alain Le Pichon,《中国贸易与帝国:怡和洋行与英国在香港统治的起源,1827-1843 年》(牛津/纽约,2006 年)。

 17. Robert Blake, Jardine Matheson: Traders of the Far East (London, 1999), p. 91. See also Alain Le Pichon, China Trade and Empire: Jardine, Matheson & Co. and the Origins of British Rule in Hong Kong, 1827–1843 (Oxford / New York, 2006).

 18.罗斯柴尔德档案馆(伦敦),RFamFD/13A/1;13B/1;13C/1;13D/1;13D/2;13/E。

 18. Rothschild Archive London, RFamFD/13A/1; 13B/1; 13C/1; 13D/1; 13D/2; 13/E.

 19. Henry Lowenfeld,《投资:一门精确的科学》(伦敦,1909 年),第 61 页。

 19. Henry Lowenfeld, Investment: An Exact Science (London, 1909), p. 61.

 20.约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯,《和平的经济后果》(伦敦,1919 年),第 1 章。

 20. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London, 1919), ch. 1.

 21. Maddison,《世界经济》,表 2-26a。

 21. Maddison, World Economy, table 2-26a.

 22. Lance E. Davis 和 RA Huttenback,《金钱与帝国的追求:1860-1912 年英国帝国主义的政治经济学》(剑桥,1988 年),第 46 页。

 22. Lance E. Davis and R. A. Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860–1912 (Cambridge, 1988), p. 46.

 23. Ranald Michie,《逆转还是变革?20 世纪的全球证券市场》,新全球研究(即将出版)。

 23. Ranald Michie, ‘Reversal or Change? The Global Securities Market in the 20th Century’, New Global Studies (forthcoming).

 24. Obstfeld 和 Taylor,《全球化》;Niall Ferguson 和 Moritz Schularick,《帝国效应:全球化第一阶段(1880-1913 年)国家风险的决定因素》,《经济史杂志》,66,2(2006 年 6 月)。另见 Michael A. Clemens 和 Jeffrey Williamson,《第一次全球资本市场繁荣(1870-1913 年)中的财富偏见》,《经济学杂志》,114,2(2004 年),第 304-337 页。

 24. Obstfeld and Taylor, ‘Globalization’; Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick, ‘The Empire Effect: The Determinants of Country Risk in the First Age of Globalization, 1880–1913’, Journal of Economic History, 66, 2 (June 2006). But see also Michael A. Clemens and Jeffrey Williamson, ‘Wealth Bias in the First Global Capital Market Boom, 1870–1913’, Economic Journal, 114, 2 (2004), pp. 304–37.

 25.权威研究是迈克尔·埃德尔斯坦的《帝国主义鼎盛时期的海外投资:英国,1850-1914》(纽约,1982 年)。

 25. The definitive study is Michael Edelstein, Overseas Investment in the Age of High Imperialism: The United Kingdom, 1850–1914 (New York, 1982).

 26. Michael Edelstein,“帝国主义:成本与收益”,载于 Roderick Floud 和 Deirdre McCloskey(编),《1700 年以来的英国经济史》,第二卷(第二版,剑桥,1994 年),第 173-216 页。

 26. Michael Edelstein, ‘Imperialism: Cost and Benefit’, in Roderick Floud and Deirdre McCloskey (eds.), The Economic History of Britain since 1700, vol. II (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1994), pp. 173–216.

 27.约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯,《外国投资与国家优势》,载唐纳德·莫格里奇(编),《约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯文集》,第十九卷(伦敦,1981 年),第 275-284 页。

 27. John Maynard Keynes, ‘Foreign Investment and National Advantage’, in Donald Moggridge (ed.), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. XIX (London, 1981), pp. 275–84.

 28.同上,  “给受托投资者的建议”,同上,第 202-206 页。

 28Idem, ‘Advice to Trustee Investors’, in ibid., pp. 202–6.

 29.根据 Irving Stone 的著作《1865-1914 年英国资本的全球输出》(伦敦,1999 年)中的数据计算得出。

 29. Calculated from the data in Irving Stone, The Global Export of Capital from Great Britain, 1865–1914 (London, 1999).

 30.请访问http://icf.som.yale.edu/sse/查看 1870 年至 1940 年上海证券交易所非常有用的股票市场指数。

 30. See the very useful stock market index for Shanghai Stock Exchange between 1870 and 1940 at http://icf.som.yale.edu/sse/.

 31. Michael Bordo 和 Hugh Rockoff,“金本位制作为‘良好管家印章’”,《经济史杂志》,56,2(1996 年 6 月),第 389-428 页。

 31. Michael Bordo and Hugh Rockoff, ‘The Gold Standard as a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval”’, Journal of Economic History, 56, 2 (June 1996), pp. 389–428.

 32. Marc Flandreau 和 Frédéric Zumer,《全球金融的形成,1880-1913》(巴黎,2004 年)。

 32. Marc Flandreau and Frédéric Zumer, The Making of Global Finance, 1880–1913 (Paris, 2004).

 33. Ferguson 和 Schularick,《帝国效应》,第 283-312 页。

 33. Ferguson and Schularick, ‘Empire Effect’, pp. 283–312.

 34.关于这一点的详细讨论,请参见尼尔·弗格森的《1848年革命与……之间的政治风险与国际债券市场》。第一次世界大战的爆发”,经济史评论,59,1(2006 年 2 月),第 70-112 页。

 34. For a full discussion of this point, see Niall Ferguson, ‘Political Risk and the International Bond Market between the 1848 Revolution and the Outbreak of the First World War’, Economic History Review, 59, 1 (February 2006), pp. 70–112.

 35 .让·德·布洛赫,战争现在不可能了吗?,反。 RC Long(伦敦,1899 年),第 14 页。十七.

 35. Jean de [Ivan] Bloch, Is War Now Impossible?, trans. R. C. Long (London, 1899), p. xvii.

 36.诺曼·安吉尔,《大幻觉:国家军事力量与其经济和社会优势的关系研究》(伦敦,1910 年),第 31 页。

 36. Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to their Economic and Social Advantage (London, 1910), p. 31.

 37.引自 James J. Sheehan,《士兵都去哪儿了?》(纽约:霍顿·米夫林公司,2007 年),第 56 页。

 37. Quoted in James J. Sheehan, Where Have all the Soldiers Gone? (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2007), p. 56.

 38. OMW Sprague,《1914 年美国危机》,《美国经济评论》,5,3(1915 年),第 505 页及后续页。

 38. O. M. W. Sprague, ‘The Crisis of 1914 in the United States’, American Economic Review, 5, 3 (1915), pp. 505ff.

 39. Brendan Brown,《欧洲货币混乱:一个时代的终结》(伦敦/纽约,1988 年),第 1-34 页。

 39. Brendan Brown, Monetary Chaos in Europe: The End of an Era (London / New York, 1988), pp. 1–34.

 40.约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯,《战争与金融体系》,《经济学杂志》,24,95(1914),第460-86页。

 40. John Maynard Keynes, ‘War and the Financial System’, Economic Journal, 24, 95 (1914), pp. 460–86.

 41. E. Victor Morgan,《英国金融政策研究,1914-1925》(伦敦,1952 年),第 3-11 页。

 41. E. Victor Morgan, Studies in British Financial Policy, 1914–1925 (London, 1952), pp. 3–11.

 42.同上,第 27 页。另见 Teresa Seabourne,《1914 年的夏天》,载于 Forrest Capie 和 Geoffrey E. Wood(编),《金融危机与世界银行体系》(伦敦,1986 年),第 78、88 页及以下。

 42. Ibid., p. 27. See also Teresa Seabourne, ‘The Summer of 1914’, in Forrest Capie and Geoffrey E. Wood (eds.), Financial Crises and the World Banking System (London, 1986), pp. 78, 88f.

 43. Sprague,《1914 年危机》,第 532 页。

 43. Sprague, ‘Crisis of 1914’, p. 532.

 44. Morgan,《研究》,第 19 页。

 44. Morgan, Studies, p. 19.

 45. Seabourne,《1914 年夏季》,第 80 页及后续页。

 45. Seabourne, ‘Summer of 1914’, pp. 80ff.

 46.参见威廉·L·西尔伯 (William L. Silber) 的著作《当华盛顿关闭华尔街时:1914 年的大金融危机和美国货币霸权的起源》(普林斯顿,2007 年)。

 46. See most recently William L. Silber, When Washington Shut Down Wall Street: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 and the Origins of America’s Monetary Supremacy (Princeton, 2007).

 47. Morgan,《研究》,第 12-23 页。

 47. Morgan, Studies, pp. 12–23.

 48. David Kynaston,《伦敦城》,第三卷:黄金的幻象,1914-1945 年(伦敦,1999 年),第 5 页。

 48. David Kynaston, The City of London, vol. III: Illusions of Gold, 1914–1945 (London, 1999), p. 5.

 49.根据 1914 年 8 月至 12 月《泰晤士报》刊登的零星价格计算得出。

 49. Calculated from isolated prices quoted in The Times between August and December 1914.

 50. Kynaston,《伦敦城》,第 5 页。

 50. Kynaston, City of London, p. 5.

 51.详情请参阅 Niall Ferguson 的《从历史中获利:金融市场与世界大战的临近》,布鲁金斯经济活动论文集(即将出版)。

 51. For details see Niall Ferguson, ‘Earning from History: Financial Markets and the Approach of World Wars’, Brookings Papers in Economic Activity (forthcoming).

 52.参见 Lyndon Moore 和 Jakub Kaluzny,“政权更迭与债务违约:第一次世界大战后俄罗斯、奥匈帝国和奥斯曼帝国的案例”,《经济史探索》,42(2005 年),第 237-258 页。

 52. See Lyndon Moore and Jakub Kaluzny, ‘Regime Change and Debt Default: The Case of Russia, Austro-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire following World War One’, Explorations in Economic History, 42 (2005), pp. 237–58.

 53. Maurice Obstfeld 和 Alan M. Taylor,“大萧条作为分水岭:长期的国际资本流动”,载于 Michael D. Bordo、Claudia Goldin 和 Eugene N. White(编),《决定性时刻:大萧条与二十世纪的美国经济》(芝加哥,1998 年),第 353-402 页。

 53. Maurice Obstfeld and Alan M. Taylor, ‘The Great Depression as a Watershed: International Capital Mobility over the Long Run’, in Michael D. Bordo, Claudia Goldin and Eugene N. White (eds.), The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 1998), pp. 353–402.

 54. Rawi Abdelal,《资本规则:全球金融的构建》(马萨诸塞州剑桥/伦敦,2007 年),第 45 页。

 54. Rawi Abdelal, Capital Rules: The Construction of Global Finance (Cambridge, MA / London, 2007), p. 45.

 55.同上,第 46 页。

 55. Ibid., p. 46.

 56. Greg Behrman,《最崇高的冒险:马歇尔计划和美国帮助拯救欧洲的时代》(纽约,2007 年)。

 56. Greg Behrman, The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save Europe (New York, 2007).

 57. Obstfeld 和 Taylor,《全球化与资本市场》,第 129 页。

 57. Obstfeld and Taylor, ‘Globalization and Capital Markets’, p. 129.

 58.参见威廉·伊斯特利,《难以捉摸的增长追求:经济学家在热带地区的冒险与挫折》(马萨诸塞州剑桥,2002 年)。

 58. See William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (Cambridge, MA, 2002).

 59. Michael Bordo,《布雷顿森林国际货币体系:历史概述》,载于idem和 Barry Eichengreen (编),《布雷顿森林体系回顾:国际货币改革的教训》(芝加哥/伦敦,1993 年),第 3-98 页。

 59. Michael Bordo, ‘The Bretton Woods International Monetary System: A Historical Overview’, in idem and Barry Eichengreen (eds.), A Retrospective on the Bretton Woods System: Lessons for International Monetary Reform (Chicago / London, 1993), pp. 3–98.

 60. Christopher S. Chivvis,“夏尔·戴高乐、雅克·吕夫和布雷顿森林体系下的法国国际货币政策”,《当代史杂志》,41,4(2006),第701-720页。

 60. Christopher S. Chivvis, ‘Charles de Gaulle, Jacques Rueff and French International Monetary Policy under Bretton Woods’, Journal of Contemporary History, 41, 4 (2006), pp. 701–20.

 61.对艾米·古德曼的采访:http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid =04/11/09/1526251 。

 61. Interview with Amy Goodman: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/09/1526251.

 62.约翰·珀金斯,《一个经济杀手的自白》(纽约,2004 年),第 xi 页。

 62. John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (New York, 2004), p. xi.

 63. Joseph E. Stiglitz,《全球化及其不满》(纽约,2002 年),第 12、14、15、17 页。

 63. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York, 2002), pp. 12, 14, 15, 17.

 64. Abdelal,《资本规则》,第 50 页及以下,第 57-75 页。

 64. Abdelal, Capital Rules, pp. 50f., 57–75.

 65.保罗·克鲁格曼,《萧条经济学的回归》(伦敦,1999 年)。

 65. Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics (London, 1999).

 66.《基金反击》,《经济学人》,2002 年 7 月 4 日。

 66. ‘The Fund Bites Back’, The Economist, 4 July 2002.

 67. Kenneth Rogoff,《60岁的姐妹》,《经济学人》,2004 年 7 月 22 日。参见《连一只猫都没有》,《经济学人》,2006 年 4 月 20 日。

 67. Kenneth Rogoff, ‘The Sisters at 60’, The Economist, 22 July 2004. Cf. ‘Not Even a Cat to Rescue’, The Economist, 20 April 2006.

 68.请参阅弗里茨·斯特恩的经典著作《金与铁:俾斯麦、布莱希罗德与德意志帝国的建立》(哈蒙兹沃思,1987 年)。

 68. See the classic study by Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder and the Building of the German Empire (Harmondsworth, 1987).

 69.乔治·索罗斯,《金融炼金术:解读市场心智》(纽约,1987 年),第 27-30 页。

 69. George Soros, The Alchemy of Finance: Reading the Mind of the Market (New York, 1987), pp. 27–30.

 70. Robert Slater,《索罗斯:世界最伟大投资者的生活、时代和交易秘诀》(纽约,1996 年),第 48 页及后续页。

 70. Robert Slater, Soros: The Life, Times and Trading Secrets of the World’s Greatest Investor (New York, 1996), pp. 48f.

 71.乔治·索罗斯,《金融市场的新范式:2008年信贷危机及其意义》(纽约,2008年),第 10 页

 71. George Soros, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crash of 2008 and What It Means (New York, 2008), p. x.

 72. Slater,《索罗斯》,第 78 页。

 72. Slater, Soros, p. 78.

 73.同上,第 105、107 页及后续页。

 73. Ibid., pp. 105, 107ff.

 74.同上,第 172 页。

 74. Ibid., p. 172.

 75.同上,第 177、182、188 页。

 75. Ibid., pp. 177, 182, 188.

 76.同上,第 10 页。

 76. Ibid., p. 10.

 77.同上,第 159 页。

 77. Ibid., p. 159.

 78. Nicholas Dunbar,《发明货币:长期资本管理的故事及其背后的传奇》(纽约,2000 年),第 92 页。

 78. Nicholas Dunbar, Inventing Money: The Story of Long-Term Capital Management and the Legends Behind It (New York, 2000), p. 92.

 79.邓巴,《货币的发明》,第 168-173 页。

 79. Dunbar, Inventing Money, pp. 168–73.

 80. André F. Perold,“长期资本管理有限合伙公司(A)”,哈佛商学院案例 9-200-007(1999 年 11 月 5 日),第 2 页。

 80. André F. Perold, ‘Long-Term Capital Management, L.P. (A)’, Harvard Business School Case 9-200-007 (5 November 1999), p. 2.

 81. Perold,《长期资本管理有限合伙公司(A)》,第 13 页。

 81. Perold, ‘Long-Term Capital Management, L.P. (A)’, p. 13.

 82.同上,第 16 页。

 82. Ibid., p. 16.

 83.有关有效市场金融理论的历史,请参阅彼得·伯恩斯坦的《资本理念:现代华尔街的不可思议的起源》(纽约,1993 年)。

 83. For a history of the efficient markets school of finance theory, see Peter Bernstein, Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street (New York, 1993).

 84.邓巴,《货币的发明》,第178页。

 84. Dunbar, Inventing Money, p. 178.

 85. Roger Lowenstein,《天才失败之时:长期资本管理公司的兴衰》(纽约,2000 年),第 126 页。

 85. Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (New York, 2000), p. 126.

 86. Perold,《长期资本管理有限合伙公司(A)》,第 11 页及后续页,第 17 页。

 86. Perold, ‘Long-Term Capital Management, L.P. (A)’, pp. 11f., 17.

 87.洛温斯坦,《天才失败时》,第127页。

 87. Lowenstein, When Genius Failed, p. 127.

 88. André F. Perold,“长期资本管理有限合伙公司(B)”,哈佛商学院案例 9-200-08(1999 年 10 月 27 日),第 1 页。

 88. André F. Perold, ‘Long-Term Capital Management, L.P. (B)’, Harvard Business School Case 9-200-08 (27 October 1999), p. 1.

 89.洛温斯坦,《天才失败时》,第 133-138 页。

 89. Lowenstein, When Genius Failed, pp. 133–8.

 90.同上,第 144 页。

 90. Ibid., p. 144.

 91.我要感谢安德烈·斯特恩,他是长期资本管理公司 (LTCM) 的投资者。

 91. I owe this point to André Stern, who was an investor in LTCM.

 92.洛温斯坦,《天才失败时》,第 147 页。

 92. Lowenstein, When Genius Failed, p. 147.

 93. André F. Perold,“长期资本管理有限合伙公司(C)”,哈佛商学院案例 9-200-09(1999 年 11 月 5 日),第 1、3 页。

 93. André F. Perold, ‘Long-Term Capital Management, L.P. (C)’, Harvard Business School Case 9-200-09 (5 November 1999), pp. 1, 3.

 94.同上,  《长期资本管理有限合伙公司(D)》,哈佛商学院案例 9-200-10(2004 年 10 月 4 日),第 1 页。Perold 的案例是迄今为止最好的解释。

 94Idem, ‘Long-Term Capital Management, L.P. (D)’, Harvard Business School Case 9-200-10 (4 October 2004), p. 1. Perold’s cases are by far the best account.

 95.洛温斯坦,《天才失败时》,第 149 页。

 95. Lowenstein, When Genius Failed, p. 149.

 96.《一切皆有可能:长期资本的销售技巧和智力是如何失败的》,《华尔街日报》 ,1998 年 11 月 16 日。

 96. ‘All Bets Are Off: How the Salesmanship and Brainpower Failed at Long-Term Capital’, Wall Street Journal, 16 November 1998.

 97.关于这一点,请参阅 Peter Bernstein 的《资本理念的演变》(纽约,2007 年)。

 97. See on this point Peter Bernstein, Capital Ideas Evolving (New York, 2007).

 98. Donald MacKenzie,“长期资本管理与套利社会学”,《经济与社会》 ,32,3(2003 年 8 月),第 374 页。

 98. Donald MacKenzie, ‘Long-Term Capital Management and the Sociology of Arbitrage’, Economy and Society, 32, 3 (August 2003), p. 374.

 99.同上,全文

 99. Ibid., passim.

 100.同上,第 365 页。

 100. Ibid., p. 365.

 101. Franklin R. Edwards,“对冲基金与长期资本管理公司的倒闭”,《经济展望杂志》,13,2(1999 年春季),第 192 页及后续页。另见 Stephen J. Brown、William N. Goetzmann 和 Roger G. Ibbotson,“离岸对冲基金:生存与业绩,1989-95 年”,《商业杂志》,72,1(1999 年 1 月),第 91-117 页。

 101. Franklin R. Edwards, ‘Hedge Funds and the Collapse of Long-Term Capital Management’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 13, 2 (Spring 1999), pp. 192f. See also Stephen J. Brown, William N. Goetzmann and Roger G. Ibbotson, ‘Offshore Hedge Funds: Survival and Performance, 1989–95’, Journal of Business, 72, 1 (January 1999), 91–117.

 102. Harry Markowitz,《风险的新前沿:养老金和非营利组织的 360 度风险管理》,纽约银行思想领导力白皮书(2005 年 10 月),第 6 页。

 102. Harry Markowitz, ‘New Frontiers of Risk: The 360 Degree Risk Manager for Pensions and Nonprofits’, The Bank of New York Thought Leadership White Paper (October 2005), p. 6.

 103.《对冲策略》,《经济学人》,2008 年 2 月 16 日。

 103. ‘Hedge Podge’, The Economist, 16 February 2008.

 104.《滚滚财源》,《经济学人》,2006 年 11 月 16 日。

 104. ‘Rolling In It’, The Economist, 16 November 2006.

 105. John Kay,“想想你可以向巴菲特收取多少费用”,《金融时报》,2008 年 3 月 11 日。

 105. John Kay, ‘Just Think, the Fees You Could Charge Buffett’, Financial Times, 11 March 2008.

 106. Stephanie Baum,“前 100 家对冲基金拥有 75% 的行业资产”,《金融新闻》,2008 年 5 月 21 日。

 106. Stephanie Baum, ‘Top 100 Hedge Funds Have 75% of Industry Assets’, Financial News, 21 May 2008.

 107. Dean P. Foster 和 H. Peyton Young,“对冲基金奇才”,《经济学家之声》(2008 年 2 月),第 2 页。

 107. Dean P. Foster and H. Peyton Young, ‘Hedge Fund Wizards’, Economists’ Voice (February 2008), p. 2.

 108. Niall Ferguson 和 Moritz Schularick,“‘中美’与全球资产市场”,国际金融10, 3 (2007),第 215-39 页。

 108. Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick, ‘“Chimerica” and Global Asset Markets’, International Finance 10, 3 (2007), pp. 215–39.

 109. Michael Dooley、David Folkerts-Landau 和 Peter Garber,“关于复兴的布雷顿森林体系的论文”,NBER 工作论文 9971(2003 年 9 月)。

 109. Michael Dooley, David Folkerts-Landau and Peter Garber, ‘An Essay on the Revived Bretton-Woods System’, NBER Working Paper 9971 (September 2003).

 110.本·伯南克,“全球储蓄过剩与美国经常账户赤字”,霍默·琼斯讲座,密苏里州圣路易斯(2005 年 4 月 15 日)。

 110. Ben Bernanke, ‘The Global Saving Glut and the U.S. Current Account Deficit’, Homer Jones Lecture, St Louis, Missouri (15 April 2005).

 111.《从毛泽东到购物中心》,《经济学人》,2008 年 2 月 16 日。

 111. ‘From Mao to the Mall’, The Economist, 16 February 2008.

 112.关于对美联储近期政策的批评,请参阅保罗·沃尔克在纽约经济俱乐部午餐会上的讲话(2008 年 4 月 8 日)。沃尔克认为,美联储采取的行动“已经达到了其合法和隐含权力的边缘”。

 112. For a critique of recent Federal Reserve policy, see Paul A. Volcker, ‘Remarks at a Luncheon of the Economic Club of New York’ (8 April 2008). In Volcker’s view, the Fed has taken ‘actions that extend to the very edge of its lawful and implied powers’.

 113.例如参见 Jamil Anderlini,“北京着眼海外,制定保障粮食供应的计划”,《金融时报》,2008 年 5 月 9 日。

 113. See e.g. Jamil Anderlini, ‘Beijing Looks at Foreign Fields in Plan to Guarantee Food Supplies’, Financial Times, 9 May 2008.

 114.可以推测,如果没有第一次世界大战,德国在 1926 年的世界出口市场份额将超过英国:Hugh Neuburger 和 Houston H. Stokes,“英德贸易竞争,1887-1913 年:反事实结果及其影响”,《社会科学史》,3,2(1979 年冬季),第 187-201 页。

 114. In the absence of the First World War, it may be conjectured, Germany would have overtaken Britain in terms of world export market share in 1926: Hugh Neuburger and Houston H. Stokes, ‘The Anglo-German Trade Rivalry, 1887–1913: A Counterfactual Outcome and Its Implications’, Social Science History, 3, 2 (Winter 1979), pp. 187–201.

 115. Aaron L. Friedberg,“美中关系的未来:冲突不可避免吗?”,《国际安全》,30,2(2005 年秋季),第 7-45 页。

 115. Aaron L. Friedberg, ‘The Future of U.S.–China Relations: Is Conflict Inevitable?’, International Security, 30, 2 (Fall 2005), pp. 7–45.

 116.花旗集团、高盛、美林、摩根士丹利和摩根大通现任首席执行官的平均金融职业生涯长度略低于 25 年半。

 116. The average length of the financial careers of the current chief executive officers of Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan is just under twenty-five and a half years.

7. 货币的衰落

7. The Descent of Money

 1.要了解全球化的局限性的一些有趣见解,请参阅 Pankaj Ghemawat 的《重新定义全球战略:在一个差异仍然重要的世界中跨越国界》(波士顿,2007 年)。

 1. For some fascinating insights into the limits of globalization, see Pankaj Ghemawat, Redefining Global Strategy: Crossing Borders in a World Where Differences Still Matter (Boston, 2007).

 2. Frederic Mishkin,魏斯曼中心杰出讲座,纽约巴鲁克学院(2006 年 10 月 12 日)。

 2. Frederic Mishkin, Weissman Center Distinguished Lecture, Baruch College, New York (12 October 2006).

 3. Larry Neal,“经济史的惊人观点”,《经济史杂志》,60,2(2000),第 317-34 页。

 3. Larry Neal, ‘A Shocking View of Economic History’, Journal of Economic History, 60, 2 (2000), pp. 317–34.

 4. Robert J. Barro 和 José F. Ursúa,“1870 年以来的宏观经济危机”,布鲁金斯经济活动论文集(即将出版)。另见 Robert J. Barro,“二十世纪的罕见灾难与资产市场”,哈佛大学工作论文(2005 年 12 月 4 日)。

 4. Robert J. Barro and José F. Ursúa, ‘Macroeconomic Crises since 1870’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (forthcoming). See also Robert J. Barro, ‘Rare Disasters and Asset Markets in the Twentieth Century’, Harvard University Working Paper (4 December 2005).

 5.纳西姆·尼古拉斯·塔勒布,《随机漫步的傻瓜:机遇在生活和市场中的隐秘作用》(第二版,纽约,2005 年)

 5. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (2nd edn., New York, 2005)

 6.同上,  《黑天鹅:高度不可能事件的影响》(伦敦,2007 年)。

 6Idem, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (London, 2007).

 7.乔治·索罗斯,《金融市场的新范式:2008 年信贷危机及其意义》(纽约,2008 年),第 91 页及后续页。

 7. Georges Soros, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crash of 2008 and What It Means, (New York, 2008), pp. 91 ff.

 8.参见弗兰克·H·奈特,《风险、不确定性和利润》(波士顿,1921 年)。

 8. See Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (Boston, 1921).

 9.约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯,《就业通论》,《经济学杂志》,51,2(1937),第214页。

 9. John Maynard Keynes, ‘The General Theory of Employment’, Economic Journal, 51, 2 (1937), p. 214.

 10. Daniel Kahneman 和 Amos Tversky,“前景理论:风险决策分析”,《计量经济学》,47,2(1979 年 3 月),第 273 页。

 10. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, ‘Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk’, Econometrica, 47, 2 (March 1979), p. 273.

 11. Eliezer Yudkowsky,“可能影响全球风险判断的认知偏差”,载于 Nick Bostrom 和 Milan Cirkovic(编),《全球灾难性风险》(牛津大学出版社,2008 年),第 91-119 页。另见 Michael J. Mauboussin,《超越你的认知:在非常规的地方发现金融智慧》(纽约/奇切斯特,2006 年)。

 11. Eliezer Yudkowsky, ‘Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks’, in Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic (eds.), Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 91–119. See also Michael J. Mauboussin, More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (New York / Chichester, 2006).

 12.马克·布坎南,《社会原子:为什么富人越来越富,作弊者被抓,以及你的邻居通常长得像你》(纽约,2007 年),第 54 页。

 12. Mark Buchanan, The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You (New York, 2007), p. 54.

 13.有关介绍,请参阅 Andrei Shleifer 的《低效市场:行为金融学导论》(牛津,2000 年)。有关一些实际应用,请参阅 Richard H. Thaler 和 Cass R. Sunstein 的《助推:改善有关健康、财富和幸福的决策》(纽黑文,2008 年)。

 13. For an introduction, see Andrei Shleifer, Inefficient Markets: An Introduction to Behavioral Finance (Oxford, 2000). For some practical applications see Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven, 2008).

 14.参见彼得·伯恩斯坦,《资本理念的演变》(纽约,2007 年)。

 14. See Peter Bernstein, Capital Ideas Evolving (New York, 2007).

 15.例如参见 James Surowiecki 的《群体的智慧》(纽约,2005 年);Ian Ayres 的《超级计算者:如何预测任何事情》(伦敦,2007 年)。

 15. See for example James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York, 2005); Ian Ayres, Super Crunchers: How Anything Can Be Predicted (London, 2007).

 16. Daniel Gross,“预测者的前景黯淡”,《纽约时报》,2007 年 3 月 4 日。

 16. Daniel Gross, ‘The Forecast for Forecasters is Dismal’, New York Times, 4 March 2007.

 17.这部经典著作于 1841 年首次出版,名为查尔斯·麦凯的《非凡的大众错觉与群体的疯狂》(纽约,2003 年 [1841 年])。

 17. The classic work, first published in 1841, is Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (New York, 2003 [1841]).

 18. Yudkowsky,《认知偏差》,第 110 页及后续页。

 18. Yudkowsky, ‘Cognitive Biases’, pp. 110f.

 19.有关 Lo 的工作的介绍,请参阅 Bernstein 的《资本理念的演变》第 4 章。另请参阅 John Authers 的文章《量化分析师适应达尔文主义分析》,《金融时报》 ,2008 年 5 月 19 日。

 19. For an introduction to Lo’s work, see Bernstein, Capital Ideas Evolving, ch. 4. See also John Authers, ‘Quants Adapting to a Darwinian Analysis’, Financial Times, 19 May 2008.

 20.以下部分内容摘自 Niall Ferguson 和 Oliver Wyman 合著的《金融服务的演变:理解过去,展望未来》(伦敦/纽约,2007 年)。

 20. The following is partly derived from Niall Ferguson and Oliver Wyman, The Evolution of Financial Services: Making Sense of the Past, Preparing for the Future (London / New York, 2007).

 21. 《演化经济学杂志》。 该领域的开创性著作有AA Alchian的《不确定性、演化和经济理论》,载于《政治经济学杂志》58(1950),第211-22页;以及RR Nelson和SG Winter的《经济变革的演化理论》(马萨诸塞州剑桥,1982年)。

 21The Journal of Evolutionary Economics. Seminal works in the field are A. A. Alchian, ‘Uncertainty, Evolution and Economic Theory’, Journal of Political Economy, 58 (1950), pp. 211–22, and R. R. Nelson and S. G. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (Cambridge, MA, 1982).

 22. Thorstein Veblen,“为什么经济学不是一门进化科学?” 《经济学季刊》,12(1898),第373-397页。

 22. Thorstein Veblen, ‘Why is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?’ Quarterly Journal of Economics, 12 (1898), pp. 373–97.

 23. Joseph A. Schumpeter,《资本主义、社会主义与民主》(伦敦,1987 年 [1943 年]),第 80-84 页。

 23. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London, 1987 [1943]), pp. 80–4.

 24. Paul Ormerod,《为什么大多数事物都会失败:进化、灭绝和经济学》(伦敦,2005 年),第 180 页及后续页。

 24. Paul Ormerod, Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics (London, 2005), pp. 180ff.

 25. Jonathan Guthrie,“老牌企业乌龟如何赢得比赛”,《金融时报》,2007 年 2 月 15 日。

 25. Jonathan Guthrie, ‘How the Old Corporate Tortoise Wins the Race’, Financial Times, 15 February 2007.

 26. Leslie Hannah,“马歇尔的‘树’与全球‘森林’:‘巨型红杉’有何不同?”,载于 NR Lamoreaux、DMG Raff 和 P. Temin(编),《在市场、企业和国家中边做边学》(马萨诸塞州剑桥,1999 年),第 253-294 页。

 26. Leslie Hannah, ‘Marshall’s “Trees” and the Global “Forest”: Were “Giant Redwoods” Different?’, in N. R. Lamoreaux, D. M. G. Raff and P. Temin (eds.), Learning by Doing in Markets, Firms and Countries (Cambridge, MA, 1999), pp. 253–94.

 27.这当然是指理查德·道金斯的《自私的基因》(第二版,牛津,1989 年)。

 27. The allusion is of course to Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (2nd edn., Oxford, 1989).

 28.鲁道夫·希尔弗丁,《金融资本:资本主义发展最新阶段的研究》(伦敦,2006 年 [1919 年])。

 28. Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development (London, 2006 [1919]).

 29.《恐惧与厌恶,以及一丝希望》,《经济学人》,2008 年 2 月 16 日。

 29. ‘Fear and Loathing, and a Hint of Hope’, The Economist, 16 February 2008.

 30. Joseph Schumpeter,《经济发展理论》(马萨诸塞州剑桥,1934 年),第 253 页。

 30. Joseph Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development (Cambridge, MA, 1934), p. 253.

 31. Bertrand Benoit 和 James Wilson,“德国总统抱怨金融市场‘怪兽’”,《金融时报》,2008 年 5 月 15 日。

 31. Bertrand Benoit and James Wilson, ‘German President Complains of Financial Markets “Monster”’, Financial Times, 15 May 2008.

8. 轻度抑郁

8. The Slight Depression

 1.金融危机调查委员会,《金融危机调查报告》,授权版:美国金融和经济危机原因国家委员会最终报告(纽约,2011 年)[以下简称 FCIC]。

 1. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, Authorized Edition: Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States (New York, 2011) [henceforth FCIC].

 2. FCIC,Kindle 位置 [以下简称 KL] 8524–28、8531–56、8571–75。

 2. FCIC, Kindle Locations [henceforth KL] 8524–28, 8531–56, 8571–75.

 3. Scott Freidheim,《雷曼兄弟内部人士:为什么这家银行本来可以而且应该被拯救》,《金融时报》,2018 年 9 月 5 日。

 3. Scott Freidheim, ‘Lehman Insider: Why the Bank Could and Should Have Been Saved’, Financial Times, 5 September 2018.

 4. Michael Lewis,《颠覆世界的人》,《名利场》(2009 年 8 月)。

 4. Michael Lewis, ‘The Man Who Crashed the World’, Vanity Fair (August 2009).

 5. Matthew O. Jackson、Brian W. Rogers 和 Yves Zenou,“社会网络结构的经济后果”,《经济文献杂志》,55,1(2017 年 3 月),第 49-95 页。另见 Matthew Elliott、Benjamin Golub 和 Matthew O. Jackson,“金融网络与传染”,《美国经济评论》,104,10(2014 年),第 3115-3153 页。

 5. Matthew O. Jackson, Brian W. Rogers and Yves Zenou, ‘The Economic Consequences of Social-Network Structure’, Journal of Economic Literature, 55, 1 (March 2017), pp. 49–95. See also Matthew Elliott, Benjamin Golub and Matthew O. Jackson, ‘Financial Networks and Contagion’, American Economic Review, 104, 10 (2014), pp. 3115–53.

 6. John Authers,“在危机中,有时你不会说出全部真相”,《金融时报》,2018 年 9 月 7 日。

 6. John Authers, ‘In a Crisis, Sometimes You Don’t Tell the Whole Story’, Financial Times, 7 September 2018.

 7. Thomas A. Russo,《信贷紧缩:我们现在处于什么位置?》,三十人小组不定期论文 76 (2008)。

 7. Thomas A. Russo, ‘Credit Crunch: Where Do We Stand?’ Group of Thirty Occasional Paper 76 (2008).

 8. http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomchistorical2008.htm:FOMC 会议记录,2015 年 9 月 16 日,第 3 页

 8http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomchistorical2008.htm: FOMC meeting transcript, 16 September 2015, p. 3.

 9.同上,第 5 页。

 9. Ibid., p. 5.

 10.同上,第 17 页。

 10. Ibid., p. 17.

 11.同上。

 11. Ibid.

 12.同上,第 20 页。

 12. Ibid., p. 20.

 13.同上,第 51 页。

 13. Ibid., p. 51.

 14.同上,第 74-75 页。

 14. Ibid., pp. 74–5.

 15. FOMC 会议记录,2008 年 12 月 15 日,第 85 页。

 15. FOMC transcript, 15 December 2008, p. 85.

 16. FOMC 会议记录,2008 年 12 月 14 日,第 85 页。

 16. FOMC transcript, 14 December 2008, p. 85.

 17.同上,第 29 页。

 17. Ibid., p. 29.

 18. FOMC 会议记录,2008 年 10 月 28 日至 29 日,第 118 页。重点为后加。

 18. FOMC meeting transcript, 28–29 October 2008, p. 118. Emphasis added.

 19. FOMC 会议记录,2008 年 12 月 15 日,第 36 页。

 19. FOMC meeting transcript, 15 December 2008, p. 36.

 20.同上,第 150-151 页。

 20. Ibid., pp. 150–1.

 21. FOMC 会议记录,2008 年 12 月 15 日至 16 日,第 12 页。

 21. FOMC meeting transcript, 15–16 December 2008, p. 12.

 22. FOMC电话会议记录,2008年9月29日,第15页。

 22. FOMC conference call transcript, 29 September 2008, p. 15.

 23. FOMC电话会议记录,2008年10月7日,第11页。

 23. FOMC conference call transcript, 7 October 2008, p. 11.

 24. FOMC 会议记录,2008 年 10 月 28 日至 29 日,第 58 页。

 24. FOMC meeting transcript, 28–29 October 2008, p. 58.

 25. FOMC 会议记录,2008 年 12 月 15 日至 16 日,第 12 页。

 25. FOMC meeting transcript, 15–16 December 2008, p. 12.

 26.同上,第 15 页。

 26. Ibid., p. 15.

 27.同上,第 132 页。

 27. Ibid., p. 132.

 28. FOMC 会议记录,2008 年 12 月 15 日,第 83 页。

 28. FOMC meeting transcript, 15 December 2008, p. 83.

 29.同上,第 97 页。

 29. Ibid., p. 97.

 30. Sam Jones,“为什么放走雷曼兄弟确实摧毁了金融市场”,《金融时报》,2009 年 3 月 12 日。另见 Darrell Duffie,“交易商银行的失败机制”,《经济展望杂志》,24,1(2010 年),第 51-72 页。

 30. Sam Jones, ‘Why Letting Lehman Go Did Crush the Financial Markets’, Financial Times, 12 March 2009. See also Darrell Duffie, ‘The Failure Mechanics of Dealer Banks’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 24, 1 (2010), pp. 51–72.

 31. Peter Wallison,“美联储,而不是储备一级基金,‘打破了美元’”,Real Clear Markets,2014 年 3 月 28 日。

 31. Peter Wallison, ‘The Fed, Not the Reserve Primary Fund, “Broke the Buck”’, Real Clear Markets, 28 March 2014.

 32. John B. Taylor,《金融危机及其政策应对:对失败原因的实证分析》,工作论文(2008 年 11 月)。另见 John Taylor,《政府如何制造了金融危机》,《华尔街日报》,2009 年 2 月 9 日。

 32. John B. Taylor, ‘The Financial Crisis and the Policy Responses: An Empirical Analysis of What Went Wrong’, working paper (November 2008). See also John Taylor, ‘How Government Created the Financial Crisis’, Wall Street Journal, 9 February 2009.

 33. Barry Eichengreen 和 Kevin H. O'Rourke,“两个萧条的故事”,Vox,2009 年 6 月 4 日。

 33. Barry Eichengreen and Kevin H. O’Rourke, ‘A Tale of Two Depressions’, Vox, 4 June 2009.

 34.美国政府问责局,《金融危机损失和多德-弗兰克法案的潜在影响》,GAO-13-180(2013 年 1 月)。

 34. United States Government Accountability Office, ‘Financial Crisis Losses and Potential Impacts of the Dodd-Frank Act’, GAO-13-180 (January 2013).

 35.《失去的经济时间:普鲁斯特指数》,《经济学人》,2012 年 2 月 25 日。

 35. ‘Lost Economic Time: The Proust Index’, Economist, 25 February 2012.

 36. Inci Ötker-Robe 和 Anca Maria Podpiera,“金融危机的社会影响:来自全球金融危机的证据”,世界银行政策研究工作论文 6703(2013 年 11 月)。

 36. Inci Ötker-Robe and Anca Maria Podpiera, ‘The Social Impact of Financial Crises: Evidence from the Global Financial Crisis’, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 6703 (November 2013).

 37. Alex Sundby,“银行高管给出令人费解的答案”,CBS 新闻,2010 年 1 月 13 日。

 37. Alex Sundby, ‘Bank Execs Offer Head-Scratching Answers’, CBS News, 13 January 2010.

 38. Lloyd Blankfein,“Lloyd Blankfein 在 Handelsblatt 银行业会议上的讲话”,2009 年 9 月:https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/archive/lcb-handelsblatt-remarks.html

 38. Lloyd Blankfein, ‘Remarks by Lloyd Blankfein at Handelsblatt Banking Conference’, September 2009: https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/archive/lcb-handelsblatt-remarks.html.

 39. Matt Taibbi,《伟大的美国泡沫机器》,《滚石》杂志,2010 年 4 月 5 日。

 39. Matt Taibbi, ‘The Great American Bubble Machine’, Rolling Stone, 5 April 2010.

 40.例如,参见保罗·克鲁格曼,《里根做到了》,《纽约时报》,2009 年 5 月 31 日。

 40. See e.g. Paul Krugman, ‘Reagan Did It’, New York Times, 31 May 2009.

 41.同上,  《金融改革入门》,《纽约时报》,2010 年 4 月 1 日。另见《朋克与富豪》,同上,2010 年 3 月 28 日。

 41Idem, ‘Financial Reform 101’, New York Times, 1 April 2010. See also ‘Punks and Plutocrats’, ibid., 28 March 2010.

 42.同上,  《让银行业务变得枯燥乏味》,《纽约时报》,2009 年 4 月 9 日。

 42Idem, ‘Making Banking Boring’, New York Times, 9 April 2009.

 43. Richard A. Posner,《资本主义民主的危机》(马萨诸塞州剑桥,2010 年)。

 43. Richard A. Posner, The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy (Cambridge, MA, 2010).

 44. Simon Johnson 和 James Kwak,《十三位银行家:华尔街的接管和下一次金融崩溃》(纽约,2010 年)。

 44. Simon Johnson and James Kwak, Thirteen Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (New York, 2010).

 45.例如,参见特纳勋爵,《危机之后:评估金融自由化的成本和收益》,第十四届CD Deshmukh纪念讲座,孟买,2010年2月15日。

 45. See e.g. Lord Turner, ‘After the Crises: Assessing the Costs and Benefits of Financial Liberalisation’, Fourteenth C. D. Deshmukh Memorial Lecture, Mumbai, 15 February 2010.

 46. Moritz Schularick 和 Alan M. Taylor,“信贷繁荣破灭:货币政策、杠杆周期和金融危机,1870-2008 年”,《美国经济评论》 ,102(2012 年 4 月),第 1029-61 页;Oscar Jorda、Moritz Schularick 和 Alan M. Taylor,“金融危机、信贷繁荣和外部失衡:140 年的经验教训”,《国际货币基金组织经济评论》 59,2(2011 年 6 月),第 340-78 页;以及同一作者的“杠杆泡沫”,工作论文(2015 年 8 月)。

 46. Moritz Schularick and Alan M. Taylor, ‘Credit Booms Gone Bust: Monetary Policy, Leverage Cycles and Financial Crises, 1870–2008’, American Economic Review, 102 (April 2012), pp. 1029–61; Oscar Jorda, Moritz Schularick and Alan M. Taylor, ‘Financial Crises, Credit Booms, and External Imbalances: 140 Years of Lessons’, IMF Economic Review 59, 2 (June 2011), pp. 340–78; and the same authors’ ‘Leveraged Bubbles’, working paper (August 2015).

 47. Henry Kaufman,《金融市场的结构性转变:人、政策和制度》(纽约,2017 年)。

 47. Henry Kaufman, Tectonic Shifts in Financial Markets: People, Policies, and Institutions (New York, 2017).

 48.感谢鲍勃·洛克纳提供这些数据。

 48. I am grateful to Bob Lockner for these figures.

 49. Charles W. Calomiris 和 Stephen H. Haber,《脆弱的设计:银行业危机和信贷稀缺的政治起源》(普林斯顿,2014 年)。

 49. Charles W. Calomiris and Stephen H. Haber, Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit (Princeton, 2014).

 50.《 华尔街日报》,2008 年 10 月 31 日。

 50Wall Street Journal, 31 October 2008.

 51.《2008 年冰岛银行倒闭:外国因素》,冰岛大学社会科学研究所政治经济研究中心为财政和经济事务部撰写的报告,2018 年 8 月 6 日。

 51. ‘The 2008 Icelandic Bank Collapse: Foreign Factors’, Report for the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs, Centre for Political and Economic Research at the Social Science Research Institute, University of Iceland, 6 August 2018.

 52. Lloyd Blankfein,“不要摧毁风险的必要催化剂”,《金融时报》,2009 年 2 月 8 日。

 52. Lloyd Blankfein, ‘Do Not Destroy the Essential Catalyst of Risk’, Financial Times, 8 February 2009.

 53.约翰·B·泰勒,《住房和货币政策》,2007 年 8 月在堪萨斯城联邦储备银行主办的杰克逊霍尔年度研讨会上的讲话。关于美联储的辩护,参见本·伯南克,《货币政策和住房泡沫》,2010 年 1 月 3 日在佐治亚州亚特兰大举行的美国经济学会年会上的讲话。

 53. John B. Taylor, ‘Housing and Monetary Policy’, address at the annual Jackson Hole Symposium sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, August 2007. For a defense of the Fed, see Ben Bernanke, ‘Monetary Policy and the Housing Bubble’, speech to Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, Atlanta, Georgia, 3 January 2010.

 54. Robert J. Shiller,《用耳语而不是呐喊挑战人群》,《纽约时报》,2008 年 11 月 2 日。

 54. Robert J. Shiller, ‘Challenging the Crowd in Whispers, Not Shouts’, New York Times, 2 November 2008.

 55. Adam Tooze,《崩溃:十年金融危机如何改变世界》(伦敦,2018 年),第 65 页及后续页。

 55. Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (London, 2018), pp. 65f.

 56. Darrell Duffie、Ada Li 和 Theo Lubke,“场外衍生品市场基础设施的政策展望”,纽约联邦储备银行工作人员报告,424(2010 年 1 月)。

 56. Darrell Duffie, Ada Li and Theo Lubke, ‘Policy Perspectives on OTC Derivatives Market Infrastructure’, Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports, 424 (January 2010).

 57.本·伯南克,2009 年 4 月 14 日在莫尔豪斯学院的演讲。反驳论点,参见 Moritz Schularick 和 Paul Wachtel,《美国失衡的形成》,CESifo 经济研究,60(2014 年 1 月),第 62-88 页。

 57. Ben Bernanke, speech at Morehouse College, 14 April 2009. For a counter-argument, see Moritz Schularick and Paul Wachtel, ‘The Making of America’s Imbalances’, CESifo Economic Studies, 60 (January 2014), pp. 62–88.

 58. Tooze,《崩溃》,第 75 页。

 58. Tooze, Crashed, p. 75.

 59. Peter J. Wallison,《对金融危机调查委员会多数派报告的异议》,美国企业研究所,2011 年 1 月 14 日。

 59. Peter J. Wallison, ‘Dissent from the Majority Report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’, American Enterprise Institute, 14 January 2011.

 60. Manuel Adelino、Antoinette Schoar 和 Felipe Severino,“抵押贷款危机中的贷款发放和违约:中产阶级的作用”,《金融研究评论》,29,7(2016 年 7 月),第 1635-70 页。

 60. Manuel Adelino, Antoinette Schoar and Felipe Severino, ‘Loan Originations and Defaults in the Mortgage Crisis: The Role of the Middle Class’, Review of Financial Studies, 29, 7 (July 2016), pp. 1635–70.

 61. Martin Feldstein,2008 年 11 月 18 日在众议院金融服务委员会作证。

 61. Martin Feldstein, Testimony before the House Committee on Financial Services, 18 November 2008.

 62. Atif Mian 和 Amir Sufi,《债务之家:他们(和你)如何造成了大衰退,以及我们如何防止它再次发生》(芝加哥,2015 年)。

 62. Atif Mian and Amir Sufi, House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again (Chicago, 2015).

 63.保罗·克鲁格曼,《第三次大萧条》,《纽约时报》,2010 年 6 月 27 日。

 63. Paul Krugman, ‘The Third Depression’, New York Times, 27 June 2010.

 64. Eichengreen 和 O'Rourke,《两个大萧条的故事》。

 64. Eichengreen and O’Rourke, ‘A Tale of Two Depressions’.

 65. Barry Eichengreen,《镜厅:大萧条、大衰退以及历史的利用与误用》(牛津,2015 年)。

 65. Barry Eichengreen, Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses – and Misuses – of History (Oxford, 2015).

 66. Claudio Borio 和 Piti Disyatat,“非常规货币政策:评估”,国际清算银行工作论文,第 292 号(2009 年 11 月);Mark Stone、Kenji Fujita 和 Kotaro Ishi,“非常规资产负债表政策是否应加入中央银行工具包?对迄今为止经验的回顾”,国际货币基金组织工作论文 WP/11/145(2011 年 6 月)。

 66. Claudio Borio and Piti Disyatat, ‘Unconventional Monetary Policies: An Appraisal’, BIS Working Papers, No. 292 (November 2009); Mark Stone, Kenji Fujita and Kotaro Ishi, ‘Should Unconventional Balance Sheet Policies Be Added to the Central Bank Toolkit? A Review of the Experience So Far’, IMF Working Paper WP/11/145 (June 2011).

 67. http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2015/08/whither-inflation.html​ ​

 67http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2015/08/whither-inflation.html.

 68. Paul Schmelzing,“1311 年以来的全球实际利率和‘超长期停滞’”,工作论文,2018 年 5 月 7 日。

 68. Paul Schmelzing, ‘Global Real Rates Since 1311 and the “Suprasecular Stagnation”’, working paper, 7 May 2018.

 69. John Cochrane,私人通信,2018 年 9 月。

 69. John Cochrane, private communication, September 2018.

 70. David Moss,《预防胜于治疗》,哈佛杂志,2009 年 9 月至 10 月。

 70. David Moss, ‘An Ounce of Prevention’, Harvard Magazine, September–October 2009.

 71. David Brooks,《第一次考验》,《纽约时报》,2009 年 1 月 22 日。

 71. David Brooks, ‘The First Test’, New York Times, 22 January 2009.

 72.有关更积极的评估,请参阅 Tooze 的《崩溃》,第 283 页。另请参阅 F. Reichling 的《美国复苏与再投资法案对 2011 年 10 月至 2011 年 12 月就业和经济产出的估计影响》,国会预算办公室 (2012 年);TG Conley 和 B. Dupor 的《美国复苏与再投资法案:仅仅是一项政府就业计划吗?》,《货币经济学杂志》,60,5 (2013 年),第 535-49 页。

 72. For more positive assessments, see Tooze, Crashed, p. 283. See F. Reichling, ‘Estimated Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Employment and Economic Output from October 2011 Through December 2011’, Congressional Budget Office (2012); T. G. Conley and B. Dupor, ‘The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Solely a Government Jobs Program?’ Journal of Monetary Economics, 60, 5 (2013), pp. 535–49.

 73.保罗·克鲁格曼,《赤字拯救了世界》,《纽约时报》,2009 年 7 月 15 日。

 73. Paul Krugman, ‘Deficits Saved the World’, New York Times, 15 July 2009.

 74. Barry Eichengreen,《全球信贷危机史》,工作论文(2008 年 12 月)。

 74. Barry Eichengreen, ‘The Global Credit Crisis as History’, working paper (December 2008).

 75. Benjamin J. Cohen,“全球金融体系有多稳定?” Project Syndicate,2017 年 9 月 29 日。

 75. Benjamin J. Cohen, ‘How Stable Is the Global Financial System?’ Project Syndicate, 29 September 2017.

 76. Tooze,《崩溃》,第 206 页及后续页,第 223 页。

 76. Tooze, Crashed, pp. 206f., 223.

 77. Luca Einaudi,“从历史角度看全球经济危机与国际合作”,《经济思想史》,22,3(2014),第71-104页。

 77. Luca Einaudi, ‘Global Economic Crisis and International Cooperation in a Historical Perspective’, History of Economic Ideas, 22, 3 (2014), pp. 71–104.

 78. Tooze,《崩溃》,第 12 页及后续页。

 78. Tooze, Crashed, pp. 12f.

 79.我不同意 Ibid.,第 78-81 页的观点。

 79. Here I disagree with Ibid., pp. 78–81.

 80.同上,第 253 页及以下。

 80. Ibid., pp. 253f.

 81. Keith Bradsher,“中国人将更多资金转移到海外”,《纽约时报》,2009 年 2 月 2 日。

 81. Keith Bradsher, ‘In Shift, Chinese Move More Money Overseas’, New York Times, 2 February 2009.

 82. Henny Sender,“中国将继续持有美国债券”,《金融时报》,2009 年 2 月 11 日。

 82. Henny Sender, ‘China to Stick with US Bonds’, Financial Times, 11 February 2009.

 83. 《人民日报》,2009年2月18日。 

 83People’s Daily, 18 February 2009.

 84.详情请见http://www.niallferguson.com/blog/calling-it-right-excerpts-from-niall-fergusons-pre-crisis-journalism

 84. See for details http://www.niallferguson.com/blog/calling-it-right-excerpts-from-niall-fergusons-pre-crisis-journalism.

 85.保罗·克鲁格曼,《经济学家怎么会错得这么离谱?》,《纽约时报》,2009 年 9 月 6 日。

 85. Paul Krugman, ‘How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?’ New York Times, 6 September 2009.

 86.致美联储主席的信,2010 年 11 月 15 日。

 86. Letter to the Chair of the Federal Reserve, 15 November 2010.

 87. Niall Ferguson、Andreas Schaab 和 Moritz Schularick,“中央银行资产负债表:1900 年以来的扩张与缩减”,欧洲央行中央银行论坛:不断变化的金融环境中的货币政策——会议论文集(法兰克福,2014 年),第 133-170 页。

 87. Niall Ferguson, Andreas Schaab and Moritz Schularick, ‘Central Bank Balance Sheets: Expansion and Reduction Since 1900’, ECB Forum on Central Banking: Monetary Policy in a Changing Financial Landscape – Conference Proceedings (Frankfurt am Main, 2014), pp. 133–70.

 88. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard,“金融危机:德国部长声称美国将失去超级大国地位”,《每日电讯报》,2008 年 9 月 25 日。

 88. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, ‘Financial Crisis: US Will Lose Superpower Status, Claims German Minister’, Daily Telegraph, 25 September 2008.

 89. Jon Faust 和 Eric M. Leeper,“正常的迷思:通货膨胀和货币政策的坎坷历程”,在堪萨斯城联邦储备银行杰克逊霍尔研讨会上发表的论文(2015 年 8 月)。

 89. Jon Faust and Eric M. Leeper, ‘The Myth of the Normal: The Bumpy Story of Inflation and Monetary Policy’, paper presented at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s Jackson Hole Symposium (August 2015).

 90. Lawrence Summers 在 2013 年 11 月 8 日举行的国际货币基金组织第十四届年度研究会议(纪念 Stanley Fischer)上的讲话:http://larrysummers.com/imf-fourteenth-annual-research-conference-in-honor-of-stanley-fischer/

 90. Lawrence Summers, remarks at the IMF fourteenth annual research conference in honor of Stanley Fischer, 8 November 2013: http://larrysummers.com/imf-fourteenth-annual-research-conference-in-honor-of-stanley-fischer/.

 91.劳伦斯·萨默斯,《论长期停滞:对伯南克的回应》,2015 年 4 月 1 日。

 91. Lawrence Summers, ‘On Secular Stagnation: A Response to Bernanke’, 1 April 2015.

 92. Lukasz Rachel 和 Thomas D. Smith,“全球实际利率的长期驱动因素”,英格兰银行工作论文,第 571 号,2015 年 12 月 11 日。

 92. Lukasz Rachel and Thomas D. Smith, ‘Secular Drivers of the Global Real Interest Rate’, Bank of England Working Paper, No. 571, 11 December 2015.

 93. Robert J. Gordon,《美国增长的兴衰:内战以来美国的生活水平》(普林斯顿,2016 年)。

 93. Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton, 2016).

 94. Faust 和 Leeper,《正常的迷思》。

 94. Faust and Leeper, ‘Myth of the Normal’.

 95. Carmen M. Reinhart 和 Kenneth S. Rogoff,“金融危机的后果”,《美国经济评论》,99,2(2009),第 466-72 页。

 95. Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, ‘The Aftermath of Financial Crises’, American Economic Review, 99, 2 (2009), pp. 466–72.

 96. Carmen M. Reinhart 和 Kenneth S. Rogoff,《这一次不同了:八个世纪的金融愚行》(普林斯顿,2009 年),图 28。

 96. Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton, 2009), figure 28.

 97. Kenneth S. Rogoff,“债务超级周期,而非长期停滞”,载于 Olivier J. Blanchard、Raghuram G. Rajan、Kenneth S. Rogoff 和 Lawrence H. Summers(编),《进步与混乱:宏观经济政策的现状》(剑桥,2016 年),第 19-28 页。

 97. Kenneth S. Rogoff, ‘Debt Supercycle, Not Secular Stagnation’, in Olivier J. Blanchard, Raghuram G. Rajan, Kenneth S. Rogoff and Lawrence H. Summers (eds.), Progress and Confusion: The State of Macroeconomic Policy (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 19–28.

 98. Niall Ferguson,《金融的衰落》,《哈佛商业评论》,2009 年 7 月至 8 月。

 98. Niall Ferguson, ‘The Descent of Finance’, Harvard Business Review, July–August 2009.

 99. Stephanie Lo 和 Kenneth Rogoff,“长期停滞、债务过剩和其他增长缓慢的原因,六年后”,国际清算银行工作论文,第 482 号(2015 年 1 月)。

 99. Stephanie Lo and Kenneth Rogoff, ‘Secular Stagnation, Debt Overhang and Other Rationales for Sluggish Growth, Six Years On’, BIS Working Paper, No. 482 (January 2015).

 100. Carmen M. Reinhart、Vincent R. Reinhart 和 Kenneth S. Rogoff,“公共债务过剩:1800 年以来的发达经济体事件”,《经济展望杂志》,26,3(2012 年夏季),第 69-86 页。

 100. Carmen M. Reinhart, Vincent R. Reinhart, and Kenneth S. Rogoff, ‘Public Debt Overhangs: Advanced-Economy Episodes since 1800’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 26, 3 (summer 2012), pp. 69–86.

 101. Christina D. Romer 和 David H. Romer,“发达国家金融危机后果的新证据”,《美国经济评论》,107,10(2017),第 3072-3118 页;以及同一作者的“为什么有些时期有所不同:宏观经济政策和金融危机的后果”,《经济学》,85(2018),第 1-40 页。

 101. Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer, ‘New Evidence on the Aftermath of Financial Crises in Advanced Countries’, American Economic Review, 107, 10 (2017), pp. 3072–3118; and the same authors’ ‘Why Some Times Are Different: Macroeconomic Policy and the Aftermath of Financial Crises’, Economica, 85 (2018), pp. 1–40.

9. 从欧元到以太坊

9. From Euro to Ethereum

 1. Niall Ferguson 和 Laurence J. Kotlikoff,“欧元区的衰落”,《外交事务》(1999 年 3 月/4 月),第 110-121 页。

 1. Niall Ferguson and Laurence J. Kotlikoff, ‘The Degeneration of EMU’, Foreign Affairs (March/April 1999), pp. 110–21.

 2. Tooze,《崩溃》,第 159 页及后续页。

 2. Tooze, Crashed, pp. 159f.

 3. Niall Ferguson,《无敌的克鲁格特隆,第一部分》,《每日野兽》,2013 年 10 月 8 日。

 3. Niall Ferguson, ‘Krugtron the Invincible, part I’, Daily Beast, 8 October 2013.

 4. Angela Monaghan,“马里奥·德拉吉敦促欧元区领导人‘勇敢地迈向经济一体化’”,《每日电讯报》 ,2012 年 5 月 24 日。

 4. Angela Monaghan, ‘Mario Draghi Urges Eurozone Leaders to Take “Courageous Leap” to Economic Integration’, Daily Telegraph, 24 May 2012.

 5.《 金融时报》,2012 年 5 月 22 日。

 5Financial Times, 22 May 2012.

 6. Rachel Cooper,“安格拉·默克尔和马里奥·蒙蒂就欧元债券发生冲突”,《每日电讯报》,2012 年 6 月 2 日。

 6. Rachel Cooper, ‘Angela Merkel and Mario Monti Clash over Eurobonds’, Daily Telegraph, 2 June 2012.

 7. Tooze,《崩溃》,第 334-335 页。

 7. Tooze, Crashed, pp. 334–5.

 8.马里奥·德拉吉于 2012 年 7 月 16 日在伦敦举行的全球投资会议上的讲话:https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2012/html/sp120726.en.html

 8. Speech by Mario Draghi at the Global Investment Conference in London, 16 July 2012: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2012/html/sp120726.en.html.

 9. Tooze,《崩溃》,第 443 页。

 9. Tooze, Crashed, p. 443.

 10. Jeremy Bulow 和 Kenneth Rogoff,“希腊式招致灾难的公式”,《华尔街日报》,2015 年 7 月 7 日。

 10. Jeremy Bulow and Kenneth Rogoff, ‘A Grecian Formula for Courting Disaster’, Wall Street Journal, 7 July 2015.

 11.同上,  《不要为希腊的挥霍无度责怪德国》,《华尔街日报》,2015 年 4 月 17 日。

 11Idem, ‘Don’t Blame Germany for Greece’s Profligacy’, Wall Street Journal, 17 April 2015.

 12. John Cochrane,“迈向无挤兑的金融体系”,载于 Martin Neil Baily 和 John B. Taylor(编),《跨越鸿沟:金融危机的新视角》(斯坦福,2014 年),第 71-84 页。另见其“有效金融改革蓝图”,载于 George P. Shultz(编),《美国蓝图》(斯坦福,2016 年),第 71-84 页。

 12. John Cochrane, ‘Toward a Run-free Financial System’, in Martin Neil Baily and John B. Taylor (eds.), Across the Great Divide: New Perspectives on the Financial Crisis (Stanford, 2014), pp. 71–84. See also his ‘A Blueprint for Effective Financial Reform’, in George P. Shultz (ed.), A Blueprint for America (Stanford, 2016), pp. 71–84.

 13. Mervyn King,《炼金术的终结:货币、银行和全球经济的未来》(伦敦,2016 年)。另见 Anat R. Admati 和 Martin Hellwig,《银行家的新装:银行业出了什么问题以及如何解决》(普林斯顿,2013 年)。

 13. Mervyn King, The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy (London, 2016). See in general Anat R. Admati and Martin Hellwig, The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It (Princeton, 2013).

 14.数据来自 RegData,由 Patrick A. McLaughlin 和 Oliver P. Sherouse(乔治梅森大学 Mercatus 中心)于 2015 年 7 月 17 日制作。

 14. Figures from RegData, produced by Patrick A. McLaughlin and Oliver P. Sherouse, Mercatus Center, George Mason University, 17 July 2015.

 15. Andrew Haldane,《狗与飞盘》,发表于堪萨斯城联邦储备银行第 36 届经济政策研讨会“不断变化的政策格局”,怀俄明州杰克逊霍尔,2012 年 8 月 31 日。

 15. Andrew Haldane, ‘The Dog and the Frisbee’, paper presented at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s 36th economic policy symposium, ‘The Changing Policy Landscape’, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, 31 August 2012.

 16. Cochrane,《迈向无跑金融体系》。

 16. Cochrane, ‘Toward a Run-free Financial System’.

 17. Hal Scott,《关联性和传染性:保护金融系统免受恐慌》(马萨诸塞州剑桥,2016 年)。

 17. Hal Scott, Connectedness and Contagion: Protecting the Financial System from Panics (Cambridge, MA, 2016).

 18. Natasha Sarin 和 Lawrence H. Summers,“大型银行是否变得更安全了?”布鲁金斯经济活动论文集,会议草稿,2016 年 9 月。

 18. Natasha Sarin and Lawrence H. Summers, ‘Have Big Banks Gotten Safer?’ Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, conference draft, September 2016.

 19. Niall Ferguson,“大到无法生存:为什么我们必须根除国家垄断资本主义”,《亚当·斯密评论》,6(2011),第327-340页。

 19. Niall Ferguson, ‘Too Big to Live: Why We Must Stamp out State Monopoly Capitalism’, Adam Smith Review, 6 (2011), pp. 327–40.

 20.金融稳定理事会,《2017 年全球影子银行监测报告》,2018 年 3 月 5 日。

 20. Financial Stability Board, Global Shadow Banking Monitoring Report 2017, 5 March 2018.

 21. Ben McLannahan,“监管机构警告美国金融监管存在漏洞”,《金融时报》,2018 年 2 月 26 日。另见 Michael Bordo,“寻求金融稳定和货币政策制度的历史视角”,《经济史杂志》,78,2(2018 年 6 月),第 319-357 页。

 21. Ben McLannahan, ‘Watchdog Warns of Gaps in US Financial Regulation’, Financial Times, 26 February 2018. See also Michael Bordo, ‘An Historical Perspective on the Quest for Financial Stability and the Monetary Policy Regime’, Journal of Economic History, 78, 2 (June 2018), pp. 319–57.

 22. Lawrence H. Summers,“为什么美联储需要一个新的政策框架”,布鲁金斯学会,2018 年 6 月 7 日:https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-the-fed-needs-a-new-monetary-policy-framework/

 22. Lawrence H. Summers, ‘Why the Fed Needs a New Policy Framework’, Brookings, 7 June 2018: https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-the-fed-needs-a-new-monetary-policy-framework/.

 23.本·伯南克,《新时代的货币政策》,布鲁金斯学会,2017 年 10 月 2 日。另见 James Hebden 和 David López-Salido,《从泰勒规则到伯南克的临时价格水平目标制》,金融与经济讨论系列 2018-051(华盛顿特区:美联储理事会,2018 年):https://doi.org/10.17016/FEDS.2018.051

 23. Ben Bernanke, ‘Monetary Policy in a New Era’, Brookings Institution, 2 October 2017. See also James Hebden and David López-Salido, ‘From Taylor’s Rule to Bernanke’s Temporary Price Level Targeting’, Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2018-051 (Washington, DC: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2018): https://doi.org/10.17016/FEDS.2018.051.

 24. Paul Tucker,《金融稳定机制的设计和治理:一个挑战技术诀窍、民主问责制和国际协调的共同资源问题》(国际治理创新中心:多伦多,2016 年)。

 24. Paul Tucker, ‘The Design and Governance of Financial Stability Regimes: A Common-resource Problem That Challenges Technical Know-How, Democratic Accountability and International Coordination’ (Centre for International Governance Innovation: Toronto, 2016).

 25. Gary Gorton,“安全资产的历史和经济学”,《经济学年鉴》,9(2017),第 547-86 页。另见 Gary Gorton、Stefan Lewellen 和 Andrew Metrick,“安全资产份额”,《美国经济评论:论文与会议记录》,102,3(2012),第 101-6 页。

 25. Gary Gorton, ‘The History and Economics of Safe Assets’, Annual Review of Economics, 9 (2017), pp. 547–86. See also Gary Gorton, Stefan Lewellen, and Andrew Metrick, ‘The Safe-Asset Share’, American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings, 102, 3 (2012), pp. 101–6.

 26.约翰·B·泰勒,《偏离正轨:政府行动和干预如何导致、延长和恶化危机》 (斯坦福,2009 年)。这也是我的著作《大衰败:制度如何衰败,经济如何死亡》 (伦敦,2012 年)的核心主题。

 26. John B. Taylor, Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged and Worsened the Crisis (Stanford, 2009). This was also a central theme of my book The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die (London, 2012).

 27. Heather Scoffield,《血色将至》,《环球邮报》,2009 年 2 月 24 日。

 27. Heather Scoffield, ‘There Will Be Blood’, Globe and Mail, 24 February 2009.

 28. Larry Diamond,“直面民主衰退”,《民主杂志》,26,1(2015 年 1 月),第 141-155 页。

 28. Larry Diamond, ‘Facing Up to the Democratic Recession’, Journal of Democracy, 26, 1 (January 2015), pp. 141–55.

 29. Frank Rich,“2008 年,美国不再相信美国梦”,《纽约杂志》 ,2018 年 8 月 5 日。

 29. Frank Rich, ‘In 2008, America Stopped Believing in the American Dream’, New York Magazine, 5 August 2018.

 30. SA Miller,“伯尼·桑德斯希望将华尔街高管因 2008 年金融危机而监禁”,《华盛顿邮报》,2015 年 10 月 6 日。

 30. S. A. Miller, ‘Bernie Sanders Wants Wall Street Execs Jailed for 2008 Financial Crisis’, Washington Times, 6 October 2015.

 31. 《华尔街日报》 2016 年 10 月 9 日报道: “希拉里·克林顿喜欢银行家(眨眼)” 。

 31. ‘Hillary Clinton Loves Bankers (Wink)’, Wall Street Journal, 9 October 2016.

 32. Susanne Craig,“特朗普吹嘘与华尔街关系融洽,但这种感觉并非完全相互的”,《华尔街日报》,2016 年 5 月 23 日。

 32. Susanne Craig, ‘Trump Boasts of Rapport with Wall St., but the Feeling Is Not Quite Mutual’, Wall Street Journal, 23 May 2016.

 33. Manuel Funke、Moritz Schularick 和 Christoph Trebesch,“走向极端:金融危机后的政治,1870-2014 年”,《欧洲经济评论》,88(2016 年),第 227-260 页。

 33. Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick and Christoph Trebesch, ‘Going to Extremes: Politics after Financial Crises, 1870–2014’, European Economic Review, 88 (2016), pp. 227–60.

 34. Salena Zito,《认真对待特朗普,而不是字面理解》,《大西洋月刊》,2016 年 9 月 23 日。

 34. Salena Zito, ‘Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally’, Atlantic, 23 September 2016.

 35.保罗·克鲁格曼,《选举日发生了什么》,《纽约时报》,2016 年 11 月 9 日。

 35. Paul Krugman, ‘What Happened on Election Day’, New York Times, 9 November 2016.

 36. Greg Ip,“金融放松管制为已经过热的经济火上浇油”,《华尔街日报》,2018 年 4 月 15 日;Rana Foroohar,“现在正是撤回金融改革的错误时机”,《金融时报》,2018 年 5 月 20 日。

 36. Greg Ip, ‘Financial Deregulation Throws Fuel on Already-Hot Economy’, Wall Street Journal, 15 April 2018; Rana Foroohar, ‘This Is Exactly the Wrong Time to Roll Back Financial Reform’, Financial Times, 20 May 2018.

 37.《三大人口趋势》,《银行信贷分析师》,2017 年 10 月 27 日。

 37. ‘Three Demographic Megatrends’, Bank Credit Analyst, 27 October 2017.

 38. Charles Goodhart 和 Manoj Pradhan,“人口结构将逆转三个数十年的全球趋势”,BIS 工作论文,第 656 号(2017 年 8 月)。

 38. Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan, ‘Demographics Will Reverse Three Multi-Decade Global Trends’, BIS Working Paper, No. 656 (August 2017).

 39.世界银行,《数字红利:世界发展报告》(华盛顿特区,2016 年)。

 39. World Bank, Digital Dividends: World Development Report (Washington, DC, 2016).

 40. Claudio Borio,“长期停滞还是金融周期拖累?”在全国商业经济协会第 33 届经济政策会议上的演讲,2017 年 3 月 5 日至 7 日。

 40. Claudio Borio, ‘Secular Stagnation or Financial Cycle Drag?’ speech at the National Association for Business Economics, 33rd Economic Policy Conference, 5–7 March 2017.

 41.国会预算办公室,《2018 年长期预算展望》(2018 年 6 月):www.cbo.gov/publication/53919

 41. Congressional Budget Office, ‘The 2018 Long-Term Budget Outlook’ (June 2018): www.cbo.gov/publication/53919.

 42 . Jim Reid、Craig Nicol、Nick Burns 和 Sukanto Chanda,“下一次金融危机”,德意志银行市场研究,2017 年 9 月 18 日;加文·戴维斯 (Gavyn Davies),“财政大分歧的后果”,《金融时报》,2018 年 5 月 20 日; Claudio Borio,“低通胀和不断上升的全球债务:只是巧合?” Zeitschrift für das gesamte Kreditwesen,2018 年 8 月 1 日。

 42. Jim Reid, Craig Nicol, Nick Burns and Sukanto Chanda, ‘The Next Financial Crisis’, Deutsche Bank Markets Research, 18 September 2017; Gavyn Davies, ‘Consequences of the Great Fiscal Divergence’, Financial Times, 20 May 2018; Claudio Borio, ‘Low Inflation and Rising Global Debt: Just a Coincidence?’ Zeitschrift für das gesamte Kreditwesen, 1 August 2018.

 43. Andrea Cerrato、Francesco Ruggieri 和 Federico Maria Ferrara,“特朗普在因中国和墨西哥而失去就业机会的县赢得了选举”,《华盛顿邮报》,2016 年 12 月 2 日。

 43. Andrea Cerrato, Francesco Ruggieri and Federico Maria Ferrara, ‘Trump Won in Counties That Lost Jobs to China and Mexico’, Washington Post, 2 December 2016.

 44. Niall Ferguson 和 Xu Xiang,“让中美再次伟大”,胡佛研究所经济工作论文,第 18105 号(2018 年 5 月 3 日)。

 44. Niall Ferguson and Xu Xiang, ‘Make Chimerica Great Again’, Hoover Institution Economic Working Paper, No. 18105 (3 May 2018).

 45. John Seungmin Kuk、Deborah Seligsohn 和 Jiakun Jack Zhang,“为什么共和党人不反击特朗普对中国的关税——一张地图”,《华盛顿邮报》,2018 年 8 月 7 日。

 45. John Seungmin Kuk, Deborah Seligsohn and Jiakun Jack Zhang, ‘Why Republicans Don’t Push back on Trump’s China Tariffs – in One Map’, Washington Post, 7 August 2018.

 46. Sahil Mahtani,“博洛雷集团和埃利奥特就意大利电信展开激烈竞争”,《金融时报》,2018 年 5 月 3 日。

 46. Sahil Mahtani, ‘Groupe Bolloré and Elliott Go Head-to-Head over Telecom Italia’, Financial Times, 3 May 2018.

 47. Marc Freed,《对冲基金业绩的可疑历史,1998–2014》,纽约大学斯特恩商学院(2015 年 3 月)。另见 Cliff Asness,《冬季对冲基金经理》,AQR:Cliff 的视角,2018 年 5 月 31 日。

 47. Marc Freed, ‘The Dubious History of Hedge Fund Performance, 1998–2014’, NYU Stern (March 2015). But see also Cliff Asness, ‘The Hedgie in Winter’, AQR: Cliff’s Perspectives, 31 May 2018.

 48. Robin Wigglesworth,“下一次金融危机不会来自‘已知的未知’”,《金融时报》,2018 年 9 月 7 日。

 48. Robin Wigglesworth, ‘The Next Financial Crisis Won’t Come from a “Known Unknown”’, Financial Times, 7 September 2018.

 49. Robin Wigglesworth,“波动病毒如何感染华尔街”,《金融时报》,2018 年 4 月 12 日。另见 Artemis Capital Management,“波动性和风险的炼金术:1987 年黑色星期一阴影下的反思性”(2017 年)。

 49. Robin Wigglesworth, ‘How a Volatility Virus Infected Wall Street’, Financial Times, 12 April 2018. See also Artemis Capital Management, ‘Volatility and the Alchemy of Risk: Reflexivity in the Shadows of Black Monday 1987’ (2017).

 50. Laura Noonan,“摩根大通的杰米·戴蒙称比特币是‘骗局’,‘比郁金香球茎还糟糕’”,《金融时报》,2017 年 9 月 12 日。

 50. Laura Noonan, ‘JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon Calls Bitcoin “a Fraud”, “Worse than Tulip Bulbs”’, Financial Times, 12 September 2017.

 51. Francesco Canepa,“欧洲央行行长康斯坦西奥将比特币与荷兰郁金香狂热相提并论”,路透社,2017 年 9 月 22 日。

 51. Francesco Canepa, ‘ECB’s Constancio Compares Bitcoin to Dutch Tulip Mania’, Reuters, 22 September 2017.

 52. Paul Krugman,《比特币是邪恶的》,《纽约时报》,2013 年 12 月 28 日。

 52. Paul Krugman, ‘Bitcoin Is Evil’, New York Times, 28 December 2013.

 53.同上,《漫长的加密货币大会》,《纽约时报》,2014 年 10 月 4 日。

 53. Idem, ‘The Long Cryptocon’, New York Times, 4 October 2014.

 54.同上,“为什么大多数经济学家的预测是错误的”,《红鲱鱼》(1998 年 6 月):https://web.archive.org/web/199 ​​80610100009/http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue55/economics.html 。

 54. Idem, ‘Why Most Economists’ Predictions Are Wrong’, Red Herring (June 1998): https://web.archive.org/web/19980610100009/http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue55/economics.html.

 55. http://hackingdistributed.com/p/2014/06/13/in-ghash-bitcoin-trusts/。​ 

 55http://hackingdistributed.com/p/2014/06/13/in-ghash-bitcoin-trusts/.

 56. https://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/GSMA_State-of-the-Industry-Report-on-Mobile-Money_2016-1.pdf​ ​

 56https://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/GSMA_State-of-the-Industry-Report-on-Mobile-Money_2016-1.pdf.

 57. https://www.statista.com/statistics/226530/mobile-payment-transaction-volume-forecast/ 

 57https://www.statista.com/statistics/226530/mobile-payment-trans action-volume-forecast/.

 58.麦肯锡全球研究院,《数字中国:推动经济走向全球竞争力》(2017 年 12 月),展品 E1。

 58. McKinsey Global Institute, Digital China: Powering the Economy to Global Competitiveness (December 2017), exhibit E1.

 59. https://www.statista.com/statistics/820853/used-a-mobile-payment-service-in-the-last-month-region/​ ​

 59https://www.statista.com/statistics/820853/used-a-mobile-payment-service-in-the-last-month-region/.

 60.麦肯锡全球研究院,《数字中国》,展品 4。

 60. McKinsey Global Institute, Digital China, exhibit 4.

 61. Eric Jing,“为无银行账户者提供金融服务的承诺”,《华尔街日报》,2018 年 1 月 17 日。

 61. Eric Jing, ‘The Promise of Financial Services for the Unbanked’, Wall Street Journal, 17 January 2018.

 62.海科·马斯,《制定新世界秩序的计划》,《商报》,8月22日2018年。

 62. Heiko Maas, ‘Making Plans for a New World Order’, Handelsblatt, 22 August 2018.

插图列表

List of Illustrations

照片版权信息已在括号内注明。我们已尽一切努力联系所有版权所有者。如有任何错误或遗漏,出版商将在后续版本中进行修正。

Photographic acknowledgements are given in parentheses. Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be happy to make good in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention.

综合插图

INTEGRATED ILLUSTRATIONS

1:波托西的里科山 (Sergio Ballivian)

1: The Cerro Rico at Potosí (Sergio Ballivian)

2 :美索达米亚出土的泥板(左),约公元前2千年(大英博物馆理事会)

2: Clay tablet (left) from Mesopotamia, c. 2nd millennium BC (Trustees of the British Museum)

3 :美索达米亚出土的泥板(右),约公元前2千年(大英博物馆理事会)

3: Clay tablet (right) from Mesopotamia, c. 2nd millennium BC (Trustees of the British Museum)

4:杰拉德·劳被捕(Mirrorpix)

4: The arrest of Gerard Law (Mirrorpix)

5:昆汀·马西斯《银行家》(1514 年),(RMN 摄)

5: Quentin Massys The Banker (1514), (photo RMN)

6:美第奇家族“秘籍”中的一页(Archive di Stato di Firenze)

6: Page from the ‘secret book’ of the Medici (Archive di Stato di Firenze)

7:日本政府十年期债券(日本驻英国大使馆)

7: Japanese government ten-year bond (Embassy of Japan in the UK)

8:彼得·范·德·海登仿老彼得·勃鲁盖尔,《金钱之战》,1570 年后(大都会艺术博物馆藏)

8: Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Battle about Money, after 1570 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

9:5%的永久债券(1785年7月)(赫什·L·斯特恩,年金博物馆)

9: A 5 per cent consol (July 1785) (Hersh L. Stern, Annuity Museum)

10:带息票的南方邦联棉花债券(迈克尔·维德勒)

10: Confederate cotton bond with coupons (Michael Vidler)

11:邦联“灰背”路易斯安那州5美元纸币(路易斯安那州立博物馆)

11: Confederate ‘greyback’ State of Louisiana $5 bill (Louisiana State Museum)

12:一张1923年德国十亿马克纸币(罗恩·怀斯摄)

12: A German billion mark note from 1923 (Ron Wise)

13:最古老的股份(1606 年),(www.oldest-share.com [已失效])

13: The oldest share (1606), (www.oldest-share.com [inactive])

14 : Compagnie des Indes(国家图书馆)的股票

14: A share in the Compagnie des Indes (Bibliothèque Nationale)

15:昆坎普瓦街一景,1719 年(新奥尔良历史收藏)

15: Scene in the rue Quincampoix, 1719 (Historic New Orleans Collection)

16:选自《愚行盛景》(1720 年)的版画(新奥尔良历史收藏)

16: Engraving from The Great Scene of Folly (1720) (Historic New Orleans Collection)

17:伯纳德·皮卡特,《献给后世的纪念碑》(1721 年)(哈佛商学院)

17: Bernard Picart, Monument Consecrated to Posterity (1721) (Harvard Business School)

18:艾伦·格林斯潘和肯尼斯·莱(PA图片社)

18: Alan Greenspan and Kenneth Lay (PA Images)

19:卡特里娜飓风后的新奥尔良(阿德里安·彭尼克摄)

19: New Orleans after Katrina (Adrian Pennink)

20:亚历山大·韦伯斯特在爱丁堡布道(道恩·麦奎兰摄)

20: Alexander Webster preaching in Edinburgh (Dawn Mcquillan)

21:苏格兰大臣遗孀基金的原始计算(苏格兰国家档案馆)

21: Calculations for the original Scottish Ministers’ Widows’ Fund (National Archives, Scotland)

22:沃尔特·斯科特爵士的人寿保险单(苏格兰遗孀保险公司)

22: Sir Walter Scott’s life insurance policy (Scottish Widows)

23:济贫院里的妇女和男子(拉姆齐·麦克唐纳文集,国家档案馆)

23: Women and men in the workhouse (Ramsay Macdonald Papers, National Archives)

24:在圣玛丽勒本济贫院用餐的男人们(彼得·希金博瑟姆摄)

24: Men dining in the St Marylebone workhouse (Peter Higginbotham)

25:米尔顿·弗里德曼(芝加哥大学)

25: Milton Friedman (University of Chicago)

26:斯托庄园(国民信托)

26: Stowe House (National Trust)

27:三代贵族:第一代、第二代和第三代白金汉公爵(斯托庄园保护信托基金:斯托学校摄影档案馆)

27: Three generations of aristocracy: the first, second and third Dukes of Buckingham (Stowe House Preservation Trust: Stowe School photographic archives)

28:底特律的饥饿游行者(沃尔特·P·鲁瑟图书馆)

28: Hunger marchers in Detroit (Walter P. Reuther Library)

29: “粉碎福特-墨菲警察暴行”抗议​​活动(沃尔特·P·鲁瑟图书馆)

29: ‘Smash Ford-Murphy Police Terror’ protest (Walter P. Reuther Library)

30《生活多美好》(PA 图片)

30: It’s a Wonderful Life (PA Images)

31:丹尼·福克纳和他的直升机(《达拉斯晨报》)

31: Danny Faulkner with his helicopter (Dallas Morning News)

32:威廉·贾丁(贾丁,马西森)

32: William Jardine (Jardine, Matheson)

33:詹姆斯·马瑟森(怡和集团)

33: James Matheson (Jardine, Matheson)

34:厄瓜多尔的海梅·罗尔多斯·阿奎莱拉和巴拿马的奥马尔·托里霍斯(盖蒂)

34: Jaime Roldós Aguilera of Ecuador and Omar Torrijos of Panama (Getty)

35:乔治·索罗斯(索罗斯)

35: George Soros (Soros)

36:财政大臣诺曼·拉蒙特(PA图片社)

36: Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont (PA Images)

指数

Index

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注:带插图的页面以斜体显示

Note: Pages with illustrations are shown in italic.

Abacus 2007- AC1,347

Abacus 2007-AC1, 347

阿拔斯王朝,30

Abbasid caliphate, 30

阿卡迪亚,134 n

Acadia, 134n

接收机构274,276

acceptance houses, 274, 276

阿恰尤利家族,39

Acciaiuoli family, 39

精算原理,173、175、177-80、182

actuarial principles, 173, 175, 177–80, 182

自适应系统,市场如,320

adaptive systems, markets as, 320

ADIA,309 n

ADIA, 309n

Admati, Anat R., 381 n

Admati, Anat R., 381n

广告,180

advertising, 180

阿富汗,6

Afghanistan, 6

非洲

Africa

援助,282

aid to, 282

英国投资,269-70

British investment in, 269–70

中国和,310

China and, 310

以及金融技术的演进,400

and evolution of financial technologies, 400

黄金交易,24

gold trade, 24

来自22的奴隶

slaves from, 22

非裔美国人229-30,245-46

African American people, 229–30, 245–46

《非洲之内》,14

‘Africas within,’ 14

年龄。参见 养老金(老年)。

age. See pensions (old age)

《杠杆时代》,第349页

Age of Leverage, 349

农业

agriculture

东西方比较,262

East-West comparison, 262

金融3,50,169,314

finance and, 3, 50, 169, 314

远期和期货合约,207

forward and future contracts, 207

“改进”,215

‘improvements,’ 215

以及迁移102,264

and migration, 102, 264

价格上涨和下跌,50、207、215、216-18、264

rising and declining prices, 50, 207, 215, 216–18, 264

以及风险,168-69

and risk, 168–69

Agtmael, Antoine van, 265 n

Agtmael, Antoine van, 265n

阿奎莱拉,海梅·罗尔多斯,284 , 286

Aguilera, Jaime Roldós, 284, 286

援助

aid

条件,281-82

conditions on, 281–82

对发展中国家252,281-82

to developing countries, 252, 281–82

用途有限,281-82

limited usefulness, 281–82

以及小额信贷,256

and microfinance, 256

以及对2007-08年金融危机的应对措施,345

and responses to financial crisis of 2007–08, 345

AIG 335,384

AIG, 335, 384

奥尔德里奇-弗里兰法案,276

Aldrich-Vreeland Act, 276

阿尔及利亚,30

Algeria, 30

阿里巴巴,406

Alibaba, 406

阿连德, 萨尔瓦多, 194 –95, 196 –97, 199

Allende, Salvador, 194–95, 196–97, 199

艾莉森,格雷厄姆,205

Allison, Graham, 205

全州保险公司,166-67

All State insurance company, 166–67

基地组织,205

Al Qaeda, 205

阿尔萨斯,134

Alsace, 134

安波那,121,125

Amboyna, 121, 125

“美国优先”的修辞,393

‘America First’ rhetoric, 393

美国内战,85-90,207

American Civil War, 85–90, 207

《美国梦首付法案》,244-45

American Dream Downpayment Act, 244–45

美国房屋抵押贷款公司,250

American Home Mortgage, 250

美国复苏与再投资法案(ARRA),358

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), 358

美洲,征服,262

Americas, conquest of, 262

阿姆斯特丹,118-19、123、125-26、127

Amsterdam, 118–19, 123, 125–26, 127

作为金融中心70、81-82、119

as financial centre, 70, 81–82, 119

阿姆斯特丹外汇银行 ( Wisselbank ) , 45 –46, 118 , 123 , 127 , 161

Amsterdam Exchange Bank (Wisselbank), 45–46, 118, 123, 127, 161

无政府主义者,17

anarchists, 17

安徒生(亚瑟),160

Andersen (Arthur), 160

安吉尔,诺曼,273

Angell, Norman, 273

安哥拉,1

Angola, 1

年金69-70、71、178

annuities, 69–70, 71, 178

蚂蚁金服,407

Ant Financial, 407

炭疽,205

anthrax, 205

反达尔文主义者,328

anti-Darwinians, 328

反足,269

Antipodes, 269

反犹主义36,84,84n

anti-Semitism, 36, 84, 84n

《反恐法》第351条

Anti-Terrorism Act, 351

安特卫普48,69,81

Antwerp, 48, 69, 81

阿普尔加思,亚当,8岁

Applegarth, Adam, 8

Apple Pay,406

Apple Pay, 406

阿拉伯

Arab

数学,30-31

mathematics, 30–31

石油25,282

oil, 25, 282

阿以战争,282

Arab-Israeli war, 282

阿拉伯之春,390

Arab Spring, 390

套利77,82

arbitrage, 77, 82

阿根廷,91,101-7,252-55

Argentina, 91, 101–7, 252–55

英国投资额为270美元。

British investment in, 270

货币,105

currencies, 105

违约危机,102、105、106-7、264

default crisis, 102, 105, 106–7, 264

安然公司和,157

Enron and, 157

通货膨胀,4,101-7

inflation, 4, 101–7

过去繁荣,4,101-2

past prosperity, 4, 101–2

股票市场,116

stock market, 116

贵族,83,214-21

aristocracy, 83, 214–21

可调利率抵押贷款 (ARM)。参见 抵押贷款、可调利率抵押贷款

ARMs. See mortgages, adjustable rate

军工/国防工业第238、273-274、279、291。另技术创新

arms/defence industry, 238, 273–74, 279, 291. See also technological innovation

艺术市场,6

art markets, 6

亚洲

Asia

援助与国际投资,第263-264页第269页第282页

aid and international investment, 263–64, 269, 282

亚洲金融危机(1997-1998 )260,265,285-287,299,304,305

Asian crisis (1997–8), 260, 265, 285–87, 299, 304, 305

以及信贷紧缩,260

and credit crunch, 260

美元挂钩,276

dollar pegs, 276

欧洲贸易25,118,125-26

European trade, 25, 118, 125–26

以及金融技术的演进,400

and evolution of financial technologies, 400

低工资经济体,生产108,307

low-wage economies, production by, 108, 307

储蓄过剩,308

savings glut, 308

主权财富基金9,309

sovereign wealth funds, 9, 309

阿斯穆森,约尔格,374

Asmussen, Jörg, 374

资产支持证券6,238,325

asset-backed securities, 6, 238, 325

以及次级抵押贷款9,308

and sub-prime mortgages, 9, 308

资产

assets

资产市场,150,151,154-55,154 n ,304

asset markets, 150, 151, 154–55, 154n, 304

对多元化投资组合需求,241 n ,258,296-97

need for diversified portfolio, 241n, 258, 296–97

新类型,322-24

new types, 322–24

非对称信息,114

asymmetric information, 114

阿塔瓦尔帕,20

Atahuallpa, 20

紧缩政策,345,373

austerity, 345, 373

澳大拉西亚,49

Australasia, 49

澳大利亚214,247,365

Australia, 214, 247, 365

奥地利/奥匈帝国,83 -84年,212年273 -74年

Austria/Austro-Hungarian empire, 83–84, 212, 273–74

债券,81,83-84,273-74,277-78

bonds, 81, 83–84, 273–74, 277–78

货币崩溃,99

currency collapses, 99

第一次世界大战,94-95,273-74

and First World War, 94–95, 273–74

自给自足,278

autarky, 278

汽车148,247

automobiles, 148, 247

阿维尼翁40,44

Avignon, 40, 44

巴比伦尼亚。参见 美索不达米亚/巴比伦尼亚

Babylonia. See Mesopotamia/Babylonia

巴格霍特,沃尔特,51岁

Bagehot, Walter, 51

巴格达,162

Baghdad, 162

巴哈马。参见 莱福德礁

Bahamas. See Lyford Cay

巴林,390

Bahrain, 390

Bailey,AH,182

Bailey, A. H., 182

贝利,大卫,180 n

Bailey, David, 180n

资产负债表,41,326

balance sheets, 41, 326

巴尔杜奇,蒂莫西,167 n

Balducci, Timothy, 167n

巴尔干国家,272-74,279

Balkan states, 272–74, 279

巴尔干战争,273 -74年

Balkan Wars, 273–74

巴兰坦,北180

Ballantynes, 180n

波罗的海国家,371

Baltic States, 371

孟加拉国252,256

Bangladesh, 252, 256

《银行特许法》第51、276

Bank Charter Act, 51, 276

国际清算银行58,209,395

Bank for International Settlements, 58, 209, 395

银行监管,381

Banking Supervision, 381

纸币。参见 纸币

banknotes. See paper money

美国银行324、327、328、334、335

Bank of America, 324, 327, 328, 334, 335

加拿大银行,360

Bank of Canada, 360

英格兰银行

Bank of England

银行和发行部门,分离,50,276

banking and issue departments, separation of, 50, 276

以及银行监管,380

and banking regulation, 380

以及2007-08年金融危机的原因,351

and causes of financial crisis of 2007–08, 351

清理角色,50

clearing role, 50

创建和发展46,50-52

creation and development of, 46, 50–52

贴现率,50

discount rate, 50

以及第一次世界大战,52,275-76

and First World War, 52, 275–76

最后贷款人,51

lender of last resort, 51

以及2007-08年金融危机的补救措施360,361

and remedies for financial crisis of 2007–08, 360, 361

储备金52,292

reserves, 52, 292

短期利率,108

short-term rates, 108

以及南海泡沫,143-45

and South Sea Bubble, 143–45

以及战争融资,46

and war finance, 46

日本银行,53

Bank of Japan, 53

以及2007-08年的金融危机,341

and the financial crisis of 2007–08, 341

以及2007-08年金融危机的补救措施357,361

and remedies for financial crisis of 2007–08, 357, 361

美国银行,149

Bank of United States, 149

银行挤兑。参见 银行

bank runs. See banks

破产

bankruptcies

美国危机55-57,59-60,250,321

in American crisis, 55–57, 59–60, 250, 321

中国政府,278

Chinese government, 278

股东风险,117

risk to shareholders, 117

美国,55-57,321

in United States, 55–57, 321

银行

banks

以及《美国危机》,第324-325页第328页

and ‘American crisis,’ 324–25, 328

资产与存款,326

assets vs. deposits, 326

银行控股公司地位,335

bank holding company status, 335

生物多样性,324

bio-diversity in, 324

精品店,324

boutique, 324

资本充足58,326

capital adequacy, 58, 326

资本与资产58,326

capital vs. assets, 58, 326

自满情绪,7-8

complacency, 7–8

合作社,324

cooperative, 324

作为信用创造者,46-47

as creators of credit, 46–47

以及加密货币,401

and cryptocurrencies, 401

去中心化,42

decentralization, 42

直拨(电话和网络),324

direct (phone and internet), 324

失败

failures

信贷紧缩时期,250、308、329

in credit crunch, 250, 308, 329

大萧条149-50,226-27

Great Depression, 149–50, 226–27

1930年代的恐慌,325

panics of 1930s, 325

免受……的侵害321,326-27

protection from, 321, 326–27

第一次世界大战,274-79

and First World War, 274–79

保证退出,329

guarantees to bail out, 329

以及对冲基金,304,324

and hedge funds, 304, 324

历史5-6,32-60,313

history of, 5–6, 32–60, 313

澳大拉西亚,49

Australasia, 49

英国和北欧,45-48,49-54,324

Britain and Northern Europe, 45–48, 49–54, 324

意大利33,39-44,48

Italy, 33, 39–44, 48

北美,49,53-54,149-51,153-55,324

North America, 49, 53–54, 149–51, 153–55, 324

以及恶性通货膨胀,98

and hyperinflation, 98

作为信息收集者和风险管理者,48

as information gatherers and risk managers, 48

银行交易50,250,308

interbank transactions, 50, 250, 308

国际,326 n

international, 326n

劳的提案,128-35

Law’s proposals for, 128–35

用于购买股票的贷款,123

loans for purchasing shares, 123

商业银行,50,274

merchant banks, 50, 274

国有/国有企业250,308,324

nationalized/state-owned, 250, 308, 324

新型50,52,324

new types of, 50, 52, 324

以及石油出口国,282

and oil-exporting countries, 282

以及场外衍生品,209

and OTC derivatives, 209

私人50,50 n ,216,324

private, 50, 50n, 216, 324

作为私人合伙企业,50

as private partnerships, 50

筹集新资金,326

raising new capital, 326

调节,50,326-27,326 n

regulation of, 50, 326–27, 326n

储备存款比率,45-48

reserves and deposits ratio, 45–48

零售和商业,324

retail and commercial, 324

运行7,47-48,53-54,336,343

runs on, 7, 47–48, 53–54, 336, 343

影子银行体系(表外实体5,249-50,326

shadow banking system (off-balance-sheet entities), 5, 249–50, 326

股东持股比例为324%。

shareholder ownership, 324

股票,290 –91

stocks, 290–91

以及次级贷款,8-9,246,247,249-50

and subprime loans, 8–9, 246, 247, 249–50

贷款激增,308

surge in lending, 308

“大到不能倒”的银行329、383、384

“too big to fail” banks, 329, 383, 384

美国资本不足,53

under-capitalization of in US, 53

另见 中央银行具体银行名称

See also central banks; specific bank names

法国银行53,82

Banque de France, 53, 82

皇家银行(原 Banque Générale)、129131134138141143145160

Banque Royale (originally Banque Générale), 129, 131, 134, 138, 141, 143, 145, 160

巴尔邦,尼古拉斯,171

Barbon, Nicholas, 171

巴克莱银行,52,309,334

Barclays Bank, 52, 309, 334

巴尔迪家族,39

Bardi family, 39

巴林银行,50、79、82、93、264、277

Barings bank, 50, 79, 82, 93, 264, 277

阿根廷,105-6,105-7,264

and Argentina, 105–6, 105–7, 264

巴克,泰瑞尔,234

Barker, Tyrell, 234

巴纳姆,菲尼亚斯,56

Barnum, Phineas, 56

以物易物,23

barter, 23

Bas,Dirck120,126

Bas, Dirck, 120, 126

巴塞尔银行业协议(I 和 II )326-27,326 n

Basel banking accords (I and II), 326–27, 326n

巴塞尔委员会,381-82,384

Basel Committee, 381–82, 384

巴塞尔协议III ,381,381 n ,384-85,386

Basel III, 381, 381n, 384–85, 386

巴达维亚,125

Batavia, 125

贝叶斯,托马斯,174

Bayes, Thomas, 174

熊市(股市),113,123

bears (stock market), 113, 123

贝尔斯登,2,249-50,296,304n309,327,333-35

Bear Stearns, 2, 249–50, 296, 304n, 309, 327, 333–35

行为金融14,318

behavioural finance, 14, 318

北京,261

Beijing, 261

比利时52,81

Belgium, 52, 81

曲线152,174,294

bell curves, 152, 174, 294

贝尔蒙特,86年8月

Belmont, August, 86

本德,约翰·海因里希,82岁

Bender, Johann Heinrich, 82

本杰明,犹大,87

Benjamin, Judah, 87

本特森,劳埃德,61岁

Bentsen, Lloyd, 61

伯克希尔哈撒韦公司300,303

Berkshire Hathaway, 300, 303

柏林,94 -95年

Berlin, 94–95

本·伯南克

Bernanke, Ben

关于亚洲储蓄过剩,308

on Asian savings glut, 308

以及美联储在2007-08年金融危机期间的政策,337-42

and Fed policy during 2007–08 financial crisis, 337–42

以及雷曼兄弟破产案,第334-35页第336页第342页

and Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, 334–35, 336, 342

以及货币政策,27

and monetary policy, 27

以及危机后的经济政策,385

and post-crisis economic policy, 385

以及2007-08年金融危机的补救措施,第356-58

and remedies for financial crisis of 2007–08, 356–58

以及对2007-08年金融危机的应对措施,343

and responses to financial crisis of 2007–08, 343

以及2007-08年金融危机的理论意义,365

and theoretical implications of financial crisis of 2007–08, 365

伯努利,丹尼尔,174

Bernoulli, Daniel, 174

伯努利,雅各布,173

Bernoulli, Jacob, 173

伯恩斯坦,彼得,315 n

Bernstein, Peter, 315n

贝弗里奇报告186-87,190

Beveridge Report, 186–87, 190

偏见,290,316-18

biases, 290, 316–18

双边贸易,363

bilateral trade, 363

票据经纪人,274

bill brokers, 274

票据贴现银行,50

bill-discounting banks, 50

128,130

billets d’état, 128, 130

商业账单,50

bills, commercial, 50

汇票(cambium per literas40,50,76

bills of exchange (cambium per literas), 40, 50, 76

伯明翰和米德兰,52

Birmingham & Midland, 52

俾斯麦,奥托·冯,184 -86年

Bismarck, Otto von, 184–86

比特388 –89,400 –405,403 n

Bitcoin, 388–89, 400–405, 403n

布莱克,费舍尔,294-95

Black, Fisher, 294–95

黑匣子。参见 布莱克-斯科尔斯模型

black box. See Black-Scholes model

“黑色”日子,152,156

‘Black’ days, 152, 156

黑色(或灰色)经济区,253

black (or grey) economic zones, 253

“黑色星期一”

‘Black Mondays’

1929年,146

1929, 146

1987年(参见 金融危机

1987 (see financial crises)

黑人。参见 非裔美国人

black people. See African American people

布莱克-斯科尔斯模型(294-95,297-98,300

Black-Scholes model (black box), 294–95, 297–98, 300

黑石,309

Blackstone, 309

“黑天鹅”,314

‘black swans,’ 314

《黑色星期四》,146-47

‘Black Thursday,’ 146–47

布莱恩,斯宾塞· H.,小,234-36

Blain, Spencer H., Jr., 234–36

Blankfein, Lloyd, 1 , 26 , 346–47 , 351

Blankfein, Lloyd, 1, 26, 346–47, 351

Bleichroeder(Arnhold & S.),289

Bleichroeder (Arnhold & S.), 289

布洛赫,伊万,273

Bloch, Ivan, 273

基于区块链的货币388-89,400-403,403 n405

blockchain-based money, 388–89, 400–403, 403n, 405

布卢姆菲尔德,亚瑟,279-80

Bloomfield, Arthur, 279–80

布朗特,约翰,143-44

Blunt, John, 143–44

法国巴黎银行,250

BNP Paribas, 250

博尔内,路德维希,79

Boerne, Ludwig, 79

玻利维亚,1,111,157,201,255-58

Bolivia, 1, 111, 157, 201, 255–58

布尔什维克,99,278-79

Bolsheviks, 99, 278–79

债券和债券市场,60,313

bonds and bond markets, 60, 313

益处3-4,313

benefits of, 3–4, 313

债券保险公司,327

bond insurance companies, 327

繁荣304,308

boom, 304, 308

打包抵押贷款(参见 证券化

bundled mortgages (see securitization)

抵押品87,89

collateral for, 87, 89

与抵押贷款相比(利差),221 –22

compared with mortgages (spread), 221–22

与股票市场相比,115-16

compared with stock markets, 115–16

棉质封底87-90,89

cotton-backed, 87–90, 89

危机和违约,68-69,91-93,102,105,106-7,117

crises and defaults, 68–69, 91–93, 102, 105, 106–7, 117

定义,61-64,68,71-72

definitions, 61–64, 68, 71–72

新兴市场债券(参见 新兴市场/发展中国家

emerging market bonds (see emerging markets/developing countries)

面值(par 68,71

face value (par), 68, 71

第一次世界大战,272-73,277-78

and First World War, 272–73, 277–78

未来,107-8

future of, 107–8

政府(参见 政府债券

government (see government bonds)

历史,61 -64年,64- 73年,76 -77年,80- 81年

history, 61–64, 64–73, 76–77, 80–81

重要性和力量62-64,68,71,83,313

importance and power of, 62–64, 68, 71, 83, 313

通货膨胀以及93-99、98、100、107-8

inflation and, 93–99, 98, 100, 107–8

保险公司和,182

insurance companies and, 182

利率63,68,308

interest rates, 63, 68, 308

流动性,67,71

liquidity, 67, 71

抵押贷款利率,63-64

and mortgage rates, 63–64

以及养老金,63、108、114

and pensions, 63, 108, 114

永续债券,71

perpetual bonds, 71

评分,385

ratings, 385

以及2007-08年金融危机的补救措施,357

and remedies for financial crisis of 2007–08, 357

右翼和左翼批评家,83

Right-and Left-wing critics of, 83

罗斯柴尔德家族,74-85

Rothschilds and, 74–85

以及储蓄机构,108

and savings institutions, 108

以及税收64,92

and taxes, 64, 92

漏洞92,117

vulnerability of, 92, 117

战争64-70,72,73,74-77,84-85,86-90,89,91-92,93-100,103

war and, 64–70, 72, 73, 74–77, 84–85, 86–90, 89, 91–92, 93–100, 103

扩大获取途径,94-95

widening access to, 94–95

《虚荣的篝火》(沃尔夫),347

Bonfire of the Vanities, The (Wolfe), 347

波恩共识,285

Bonn Consensus, 285

簿记,41,41-42

bookkeeping, 41, 41–42

博尔赫斯,豪尔赫·路易斯,103

Borges, Jorge Luis, 103

博里奥,克劳迪奥,395

Borio, Claudio, 395

借贷。参见 信用债务/负债。

borrowing. See credit; debt/debts

博斯金,迈克尔,333 n

Boskin, Michael, 333n

波士顿244,261

Boston, 244, 261

波士顿大学,380

Boston University, 380

波提切利,桑德罗39,43

Botticelli, Sandro, 39, 43

“bottomry”,170

‘bottomry,’ 170

布雷迪,尼古拉斯,152

Brady, Nicholas, 152

布雷尔斯福德,亨利·诺埃尔,273

Brailsford, Henry Noel, 273

巴西,18,81,157,270,365另见金砖国家(巴西、俄罗斯印度、中国:快速工业化

Brazil, 18, 81, 157, 270, 365. See also BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China: Big Rapidly Industrializing Countries)

布雷顿森林,280-84,288,401

Bretton Woods, 280–84, 288, 401

布雷顿森林体系第二阶段,306

Bretton Woods II, 306

英国脱392,396

Brexit, 392, 396

白里安,阿里斯蒂德,147

Briand, Aristide, 147

金砖国家(巴西俄罗斯、印度、中国:快速工业化大国),261,309

BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China: Big Rapidly Industrializing Countries), 261, 309

桥水对冲基金,362

Bridgewater hedge fund, 362

布里尔,布兰登,333 n

Brier, Brandon, 333n

英国

Britain

以及美国内战,87 -88年

and American Civil War, 87–88

纸币,26

banknotes, 26

银行与工业化,45-48,49-53

banks and industrialization, 45–48, 49–53

以及英国脱欧,396

and Brexit, 396

企业倒闭,321

business failures, 321

以及2007-08年金融危机的原因,第348-49页第350页

and causes of financial crisis of 2007–08, 348–49, 350

殖民地(参见 大英帝国

colonies (See British Empire)

与法国相比,130

compared with France, 130

与日本相比,192-93

compared with Japan, 192–93

生活成本,25

cost of living, 25

棉花产业,87 -88年

cotton industry, 87–88

东印度贸易,125,126 见东印度公司[英国]

East Indies trade, 125, 126 (see also East India Company [British])

经济,193-94

economy, 193–94

2007-08年金融危机期间的经济,355

economy during financial crisis of 2007–08, 355

拿破仑战争的财政状况,74 -79年

finances for Napoleonic wars, 74–79

金融知识匮乏,12

financial ignorance, 12

金融业对GDP的贡献,5

financial sector’s contribution to GDP, 5

以及第一次世界大战,94,274-79

and First World War, 94, 274–79

财政体系,70

fiscal system, 70

外国投资263,264-66,268-71

foreign investment, 263, 264–66, 268–71

外国投资,71

foreign investment in, 71

光荣革命,70,126

Glorious Revolution, 70, 126

房价和房产所有权211n214,241,258

house prices and property ownership, 211n, 214, 241, 258

住房政策,230-32,240

housing policies, 230–32, 240

通货膨胀,101

inflation, 101

机构投资者和,181-83

institutional investors and, 181–83

以及保险4,183

and insurance, 4, 183

抵押贷款利息减免,231

mortgage interest relief, 231

国债75,92

national debt, 75, 92

养老金(参见下文“福利国家”子条目)

pensions (see welfare state subentry below)

贫困,14,36-38

poverty in, 14, 36–38

储蓄过剩,269

savings glut, 269

西班牙帝国,以及25

Spanish Empire and, 25

股票市场116、147、239-40​​

stock market, 116, 147, 239–40

以及次级抵押贷款,8

and sub-prime mortgages, 8

投票权,214-15

voting rights, 214–15

福利国家,183、184-187、186-187、190-194、201

welfare state, 183, 184–87, 186–87, 190–94, 201

另见 英语国家苏格兰

See also English-speaking countries; Scotland

大英帝国

British Empire

以及债券市场,94

and bond market, 94

殖民地的控制270-71,283

control of colonies, 270–71, 283

公司金融作为基础,4

corporate finance as foundation of, 4

以及货币的演变,408

and evolution of money, 408

以及投资92,270

and investment, 92, 270

作为毒品国家,267

as narco-state, 267

民族主义和独立运动,271

nationalist and independence movements, 271

另见 英国

See also Britain

广义资金,58

broad money, 58

经纪人 142,142

brokers, 142, 142

布罗诺夫斯基,雅各布,3,331

Bronowski, Jacob, 3, 331

青铜,23

bronze, 23

老彼得·勃鲁盖尔,65岁

Bruegel, Pieter the Elder, 65

布鲁日,44

Bruges, 44

泡沫法案,145

Bubble Act, 145

气泡

bubbles

资产价格149-50,154-55

asset-price, 149–50, 154–55

五个阶段​​,分别8 –9、113 –14、137 –38

five stages of, 8–9, 113–14, 137–38

位移,133-34,137-38,148

displacement, 133–34, 137–38, 148

历史,113-14,117,126

history of, 113–14, 117, 126

国际压力以及,154

international pressures and, 154

卡菲尔(金矿),272

Kaffir (gold mine), 272

密西西比州,130-45

Mississippi, 130–45

货币政策和,153-55,160

monetary policy and, 153–55, 160

房产价格214、241-42、245、258

property price, 214, 241–42, 245, 258

反身性,290

reflexivity of, 290

南海143-45,172

South Sea, 143–45, 172

超级,314

super, 314

technology (dot.com), 6 , 115 , 153–54 , 260

technology (dot.com), 6, 115, 153–54, 260

另见 金融危机

See also financial crises

布奇,埃尔南,198

Büchi, Hernán, 198

白金汉公爵,第216-20页第219页 第255页

Buckingham, Dukes of, 216–20, 219, 255

布宜诺斯艾利斯, 101 , 104 , 251 –55

Buenos Aires, 101, 104, 251–55

巴菲特,沃伦209,299-300,303

Buffett, Warren, 209, 299–300, 303

房屋互助协会,第226页另见 互助协会。

building societies, 226. See also mutual associations

保加利亚,94

Bulgaria, 94

布拉德,詹姆斯338,358

Bullard, James, 338, 358

牛市股市),113,123,160

bulls (stock market), 113, 123, 160

德国联邦银行,373

Bundesbank, 373

邦恩,马修,205

Bunn, Matthew, 205

官僚机构,252,325

bureaucracy, 252, 325

美国经济分析局,344

Bureau of Economic Analysis, 344

丧葬互助会,169

burial societies, 169

布什,乔治·W·布什总统109、157、280脚注327、343

Bush, President George W., 109, 157, 280n, 327, 343

预算赤字和联邦债务,109

budget deficit and federal debt, 109

以及安然公司,157

and Enron, 157

以及房屋所有权,244-45

and home ownership, 244–45

企业。参见 企业家。

businesses. See entrepreneurs

商业周刊,114-15

Business Week, 114–15

布特林,维塔利克,402

Buterin, Vitalik, 402

加莱,69

Calais, 69

卡兰查,弗雷·安东尼奥·德拉,22 岁

Calancha, Fray Antonio de la, 22

加州能源放松管制,157

Californian energy deregulation, 157

加州公共雇员基金,204

California Public Employees’ fund, 204

看涨期权12,208

call options, 12, 208

坎比,贝尔纳多,172

Cambi, Bernardo, 172

柬埔寨,254

Cambodia, 254

坎德苏,米歇尔,285

Camdessus, Michel, 285

加拿大,136,214,268,269,366,395

Canada, 136, 214, 268, 269, 366, 395

癌症,169

cancer, 169

卡内蒂,埃利亚斯,97岁

Canetti, Elias, 97

坎蒂隆,理查德,135

Cantillon, Richard, 135

广州。参见 广州

Canton. See Guangzhou

首都

capital

充足性(参见 银行

adequacy (See banks)

赞赏117,240

appreciation, 117, 240

控制变量278、280、287、305

controls, 278, 280, 287, 305

“死亡252,254

‘dead,’ 252, 254

出口/流动性,114,269-72,278,280-81,282,283,305-6

export/mobility, 114, 269–72, 278, 280–81, 282, 283, 305–6

市场(参见 资本市场

market (see capital market)

资本资产定价模型(CAPM),297

Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), 297

资本主义

capitalism

以及积累,17

and accumulation, 17

以及该公司,111-12

and the company, 111–12

进化过程,320-21

evolutionary processes in, 320–21

以及恶性通货膨胀,99

and hyperinflation, 99

还有金钱,17

and money, 17

以及战争,272 -73年

and war, 272–73

以及福利国家,194

and welfare state, 194

资本市场

capital market

据称有所改善,7

alleged improvement, 7

自由化,285

liberalization, 285

第一资本,324

Capital One, 324

CAPM。参见 资本资产定价模型(CAPM)。

CAPM. See Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM)

卡普拉,弗兰克,227

Capra, Frank, 227

加勒比国家,92,262

Caribbean countries, 92, 262

卡莱尔,309

Carlyle, 309

卡内基,安德鲁,273

Carnegie, Andrew, 273

卡特,吉米233,338

Carter, Jimmy, 233, 338

卡维尔,詹姆斯61,109

Carville, James, 61, 109

凯斯-席勒指数239,241

Case-Shiller index, 239, 241

现金

cash

缺乏(参见 加密货币电子货币无货币社会

absence of (see cryptocurrencies; electronic money; moneyless societies)

“关联”,17

‘nexus,’ 17

在人们手中,28

in people’s hands, 28

另见 硬币/铸币纸币

See also coins/coinage; paper money

卡斯蒂利亚,19,24 西班牙

Castile, 19, 24. see also Spain

Castlemilk,257

Castlemilk, 257

卡斯尔雷勋爵,77岁

Castlereagh, Lord, 77

卡斯特罗,菲德尔,195

Castro, Fidel, 195

卡斯特罗,塞尔吉奥·德,197

Castro, Sergio de, 197

灾难。参见 灾难。

catastrophes. See disasters

猫债券,209

cat bonds, 209

卡托研究所,253

Cato Institute, 253

考阿斯,豪尔赫,197

Cauas, Jorge, 197

卡瓦洛,多明戈,106-7

Cavallo, Domingo, 106–7

凯恩,詹姆斯·E.,2

Cayne, James E., 2

CDO。参见 担保债务凭证

CDOs. See collateralized obligations

CDS。参见 信用违约互换(CDS)。

CDS. See credit default swaps (CDS)

人口普查(合同),69

census (contract), 69

负责任贷款中心,248

Center for Responsible Lending, 248

中美洲,92

Central America, 92

中央银行,45-48,53,54,309

central banks, 45–48, 53, 54, 309

以及金融危机的后果,394-95

and aftermath of financial crisis, 394–95

以及《黑色星期一》(1987),152

and Black Monday (1987), 152

以及气泡,114,161

and bubbles, 114, 161

成立,53

establishment of, 53

明确目标,108

explicit targets, 108

独立,108

independence of, 108

以及非理性市场,160

and irrational markets, 160

君主们,以及131

monarchs and, 131

纸币发行垄断46、48、50

monopolies on note issue, 46, 48, 50

油价上涨,282

and oil price rises, 282

以及次贷危机,9

and subprime crisis, 9

以及战争,93

and war, 93

另见英格兰银行等。

See also Bank of England etc.

中央计划19,305,313

central planning, 19, 305, 313

塞罗里科 20-22,21

Cerro Rico, 20–22, 21

确定性,173另见 概率。

certainty, 173. See also probability

混沌理论,346

chaos theory, 346

慈善机构,183

charity, 183

查理曼大帝,24岁30岁

Charlemagne, 24, 30

查理二世,国王,70 -71年

Charles II, King, 70–71

勃艮第公爵大胆查理,44岁

Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, 44

支票,45

cheques, 45

Chewco Investments,159

Chewco Investments, 159

芝加哥

Chicago

芝加哥男孩196-97,200-201

Chicago Boys, 196–97, 200–201

经济理论196-97,199-200

economic theories, 196–97, 199–200

期货市场,206-8

futures market in, 206–8

芝加哥商品交易所,208-9

Chicago Mercantile Exchange, 208–9

智利,91,102,194-201,268,365

Chile, 91, 102, 194–201, 268, 365

《奇美拉》, 13 , 307–11 , 331 , 349 , 352 , 362–63 , 365 , 396–400

‘Chimerica,’ 13, 307–11, 331, 349, 352, 362–63, 365, 396–400

中国,30,80,141,189,271,304-12

China, 30, 80, 141, 189, 271, 304–12

以及金融危机的后果395,397

and aftermath of financial crisis, 395, 397

作为美国银行家,4、13、260、261、305-11

as America’s banker, 4, 13, 260, 261, 305–11

纸币和硬币,26,263

banknotes and coinage, 26, 263

破产与违约(1921),278

bankruptcy and default (1921), 278

棉花贸易,90

cotton trade, 90

信用创造,395

credit creation, 395

以及加密货币,405

and cryptocurrencies, 405

以及货币危机(1997-1998),305

and currency crisis (1997–8), 305

1700 年后的衰落,262-63

decline after 1700, 262–63

人口和环境挑战,261

demographic and environmental challenges, 261

就业人数,306

employment, 306

企业区,305

enterprise zones, 305

以及货币演变,406,407-8

and evolution of money, 406, 407–8

出口禁令,310

export prohibitions, 310

出口,305、306-307、309

exports, 305, 306–7, 309

财务限制,262-63

financial constraints, 262–63

以及金融创新,406-7

and financial innovations, 406–7

外汇储备306,309

foreign exchange reserves, 306, 309

外国投资,第263-264页第265页第268页第271页第305页

foreign investment in, 263–64, 265, 268, 271, 305

以及全球化263,271

and globalization, 263, 271

金丝,125

gold and silk, 125

以及政府资助实体,352

and government-sponsored entities, 352

历史,261-64,265-68

history, 261–64, 265–68

帝国主义的潜台词,310

imperialist undertones, 310

收入,306-8

incomes, 306–8

工业化和城市化,305

industrialization and urbanization, 305

通胀压力,261,310

inflationary pressures, 261, 310

经济自由化,305

liberalization of economy, 305

百万富翁,305

millionaires, 305

自然资源争夺战,310-11

natural resources scramble, 310–11

鸦片战争,265 -68年

opium wars, 265–68

价格管制,310

price controls, 310

私营企业,305

private enterprise, 305

房地产价格飙升,214

property price boom, 214

铁路,268

railways, 268

以及2007-08年金融危机的补救措施,355、360-362、362-364

and remedies for financial crisis of 2007–08, 355, 360–62, 362–64

人民币305,310

renminbi, 305, 310

镇压,196 n

repression, 196n

1911年革命,271

revolution of 1911, 271

储蓄,306 –8

savings, 306–8

股票市场,261

stock market, 261

以及技术,261-62

and technology, 261–62

与美国的贸易战,407-8

trade war with US, 407–8

以及美国经济衰退前景,第308-9

and US recession prospects, 308–9

与日本的战争(参见 “日本”

wars with Japan (See Japan)

参见 金砖国家;香港

See BRICs; Hong Kong

中美关系,396-400

China-America relations, 396–400

中国银行业监督管理委员会,363

China Banking Regulatory Commission, 363

中国投资有限责任公司,310 n

China Investment Corporation, 310n

中国国家外汇管理局,363

Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange, 363

重庆,305

Chongqing, 305

基督徒

Christians

在中国,268

in China, 268

以及金钱,1,24

and money, 1, 24

以及高利贷,33-34、40、66、69

and usury, 33–34, 40, 66, 69

丘吉尔爵士,温斯顿,186 -187年

Churchill, Sir Winston, 186–87

Citadel Investment Group ,2,206-7,208,209-10,302,326

Citadel Investment Group, 2, 206–7, 208, 209–10, 302, 326

花旗银行,336

Citibank, 336

花旗集团,2,309,324

Citigroup, 2, 309, 324

纽约城市银行,323

City Bank of New York, 323

民权,229-30

civil rights, 229–30

公务员制度,70-71

civil services, 70–71

内战,389

civil wars, 389

阶级冲突,221-23

class conflicts, 221–23

泥质和泥板1、26、27-28、28-29

clay tokens and tablets, 1, 26, 27–28, 28–29

清算银行,334

clearing banks, 334

神职人员,175

clergymen, 175

气候变化,15,162,205,328

climate change, 15, 162, 205, 328

克林顿,比尔61,201,253,348

Clinton, Bill, 61, 201, 253, 348

克林顿,希拉里,391

Clinton, Hillary, 391

克莱夫,罗伯特,125

Clive, Robert, 125

煤炭215,262

coal, 215, 262

科贝特,威廉,92岁

Cobbett, William, 92

科克伦,约翰333 n ,357,380

Cochrane, John, 333n, 357, 380

扬·彼得松·科恩,124 –25

Coen, Jan Pieterszoon, 124–25

共同进化,322

co-evolution, 322

认知陷阱,317-19

cognitive traps, 317–19

硬币/铸币,23-24、27、30、40、44​​

coins/coinage, 23–24, 27, 30, 40, 44

27、29的替代方案 粘土代币和泥板电子货币纸币

alternatives to, 27, 29 (see also clay tokens and tablets; electronic money; paper money)

贬值短缺和贬值,24、70-71、118、131、138、282 货币贬值/危机/崩溃

debasements, shortages and depreciations, 24, 70–71, 118, 131, 138, 282 (see also currency devaluations/crises/collapses)

短缺,24

shortages, 24

抵押品。参见 股份(或股票或权益)。

collateral. see shares (or stocks or equities)

担保债务

collateralized obligations

债务(CDO )8、238、246、249、308、347、349、371-72

debt (CDOs), 8, 238, 246, 249, 308, 347, 349, 371–72

贷款( CLO),382,385

loans (CLOs), 382, 385

抵押贷款,238

mortgage, 238

哥伦比亚,18,91,116,157,201

Colombia, 18, 91, 116, 157, 201

殖民地贷款法案,270

Colonial Loans Act, 270

殖民地证券,269-70

colonial securities, 269–70

殖民地股票法,270

Colonial Stock Act, 270

哥伦布,克里斯托弗,19,19 n

Columbus, Christopher, 19, 19n

商业银行,52家

commercial banks, 52

商业房地产贷款,350

commercial real estate loans, 350

非正规财产正规化委员会,254

Commission for the Formalization of Informal Property, 254

商品市场和价格,208

commodity markets and prices, 208

2000年代激增6,304,311

surge in (2000s), 6, 304, 311

以及美中贸易关系,365-66

and US-China trade relations, 365–66

以及战争275,311

and war, 275, 311

通信改进,263,271-72

communications, improvements in, 263, 271–72

共产党,17

Communists, 17

以及大萧条,221 -222年

and Great Depression, 221–22

以及金钱,17-18

and money, 17–18

共产主义国家

Communist states

以及资本债务市场,282-83

and capital debt market, 282–83

中央计划19,305

central planning, 19, 305

劳动17-18,19

and labour, 17–18, 19

还有金钱,19

and money, 19

社区再投资法,230

Community Reinvestment Act, 230

公司

companies

集团,323

conglomeration, 323

创建于144 –45 年

creation of, 144–45

灭绝事件,321-22

extinction among, 321–22

发明和发展,111-12

invention and development of, 111–12

类型322-24,328

new types, 322–24, 328

规制144,328-30

regulation of, 144, 328–30

西印度公司(Compagnie des Indes)。参见 密西西比公司。

Company of the Indies (Compagnie des Indes). See Mississippi Company

西方公司 Compagnie d' Occident130、131、133

Company of the West (Compagnie d’Occident), 130, 131, 133

比赛,322

competition, 322

计算机108,153,395

computers, 108, 153, 395

所有权集中,323

concentration of ownership, 323

工头65-66

condottieri, 65–66

导管,5,9,249-50

conduits, 5, 9, 249–50

邦联,85 -90年

Confederacy, 85–90

置信区间173,318

confidence intervals, 173, 318

集团,323

conglomerates, 323

国会预算办公室109、359、395

Congressional Budget Office, 109, 359, 395

合取谬误,317

conjunction fallacy, 317

征服者,1,19-24,28,51

conquistadors, 1, 19–24, 28, 51

保守主义,393

conservatism, 393

保守党

Conservative party

住房政策,231

housing policies, 231

以及福利国家,193

and welfare state, 193

综合基金,71

Consolidated Fund, 71

控制台, 71 –72, 72 , 75 , 79 , 270 , 272 , 277

consols, 71–72, 72, 75, 79, 270, 272, 277

警员(阿奇博尔德),180 n

Constable (Archibald), 180n

Constâncio, Vítor, 402

Constâncio, Vítor, 402

君士坦丁堡,34

Constantinople, 34

建筑业,222

construction industry, 222

消费者信心指数,354

consumer confidence, 354

耐用消费品,148

consumer durables, 148

消费者金融与信贷4,57,148,324

consumer finance and credit, 4, 57, 148, 324

消费者金融保护386,394

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 386, 394

消费者物价通胀率,367

consumer price inflation, 367

消费下降,314

consumption, falls in, 314

可兑换性。参见 货币

convertibility. See currency

合作社。参见 银行

cooperatives. See banks

科尔宾,杰里米,391

Corbyn, Jeremy, 391

《谷物法废除》第216、218

Corn Law Repeal, 216, 218

科罗曼德尔,125

Coromandel, 125

公司财务,4

corporate finance, 4

公司,393

corporations, 393

腐败,270

corruption, 270

生活成本上涨25,116

cost of living, rises, 25, 116

棉,87-90

cotton, 87–90

公屋,第231-232页另见 公共住房。

council housing, 231–32. See also public housing

部长会议,372

Council of Ministers, 372

交易对手风险250,304

counterparty risks, 250, 304

国家银行,50,53

country banks, 50, 53

Countrywide Financial ,2,250,352

Countrywide Financial, 2, 250, 352

优惠券,63

coupon, 63

崩溃。参见 金融危机。

crashes. See financial crises

克劳福德,威廉,234

Crawford, William, 234

创造论,328

creationism, 328

信用

credit

以及金融危机的后果,394-95

and aftermath of financial crisis, 394–95

以未来收益为抵押进行借款,258

borrowing against future earnings, 258

卡特控制着,338

Carter controls on, 338

对生长至关重要30,59

essential for growth, 30, 59

148期

instalment, 148

起源,29-30

origins of, 29–30

评分229-30,244

ratings, 229–30, 244

以及2007-08年金融危机的补救措施,362

and remedies for financial crisis of 2007–08, 362

银行资产总额为48

as total of banks’ assets, 48

另见 债务小额信贷

See also debt/debts; microfinance

信用卡持卡人,11

credit card holders, 11

信贷紧缩

credit crunches

1914年,275

1914, 275

2007-2008年(参见 金融危机

2007–8 (See financial crises)

以及2007-08年的金融危机,344

and financial crisis of 2007–08, 344

以及雷曼兄弟破产案,336

and Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, 336

以及2007-08年金融危机的补救措施,362

and remedies for financial crisis of 2007–08, 362

信用违约互换(CDS )5,12,208-9,343,385-86

credit default swaps (CDS), 5, 12, 208–9, 343, 385–86

信贷市场

credit markets

危机(2007 250,260,324-25

crisis (2007), 250, 260, 324–25

婴儿期,35

infancy, 35

信贷动产公司,52

Crédit Mobilier, 52

瑞士信贷248、382n、404

Credit Suisse, 248, 382n, 404

信用合作社,257

credit unions, 257

信用9,255-57

creditworthiness, 9, 255–57

克里米亚半岛,390

Crimean peninsula, 390

危机。参见 金融危机。

crises. See financial crises

克罗地亚,1

Croatia, 1

跨境资本流动,344参见 资本、出口/流动性。

cross-border capital flows, 344. See capital, export/mobility

人群,318

crowds, 318

十字军东征,24

Crusades, 24

加密货币388-89,389,400-408

cryptocurrencies, 388–89, 389, 400–408

货币

currency

转换问题,40

conversion problems, 40

转换性,276,280

convertibility, 276, 280

第一全球(西班牙语),25

first global (Spanish), 25

操纵,310

manipulation, 310

钉子,54,106-7

pegs, 54, 106–7

改革

reform

阿姆斯特丹45,118

Amsterdam, 45, 118

阿根廷,104

Argentina, 104

另请参阅: 硬币/货币加密货币汇率

See also coins/coinage; cryptocurrencies; exchange rates

货币贬值/危机/崩溃,63,116,305

currency devaluations/crises/collapses, 63, 116, 305

第一次世界大战后,99-100

after First World War, 99–100

以及金融危机的后果,398

and aftermath of financial crisis, 398

阿根廷102-3,116

Argentina, 102–3, 116

以及加密货币,404

and cryptocurrencies, 404

中世纪君主,282

medieval monarchs, 282

英镑贬值(1992 年),292

sterling devaluation (1992), 292

活期账户,46

current accounts, 46

捷克共和国,373

Czech Republic, 373

达拉斯,232,234-35

Dallas, 232, 234–35

但丁·阿利吉耶里,33

Dante Alighieri, 33

达姆施塔特银行,52

Darmstädter Bank, 52

达罗,查尔斯,212

Darrow, Charles, 212

达尔文,查尔斯,331

Darwin, Charles, 331

金融系统中的达尔文过程15,319-28

Darwinian processes in financial system, 15, 319–28

达蒂尼,弗朗切斯科,170-71

Datini, Francesco, 170–71

《达芬奇密码》,第 31

Da Vinci Code, The, 31n

戴维斯,杰斐逊,87

Davis, Jefferson, 87

道金斯,理查德,359

Dawkins, Richard, 359

迪尔伯恩,222

Dearborn, 222

死亡原因,168-69

death, causes of, 168–69

债务

debt/debts

以及2007-08年金融危机的原因,348

and causes of financial crisis of 2007–08, 348

债务与收入余额,258

debt vs. income balance, 258

暂停令,277

moratoria, 277

山景图片,66

mountain image, 66

起源(参见 版权信息

origins of (see credit)

以及2007-08年金融危机的补救措施,第366、369

and remedies for financial crisis of 2007–08, 366, 369

证券化(参见 证券化

securitization (see securitization)

可转让性(向持票人支付),29

transferability (pay the bearer), 29

债务人的不可靠性敌意3,35-36,55-57

unreliability and hostility of debtors, 3, 35–36, 55–57

债务证券,389

debt securities, 389

债务与GDP比率371,378

debt-to-GDP ratios, 371, 378

十进制系统,31

decimal system, 31

国防。参见 武器/国防工业

defence. See arms/defence industry

赤字政府,109,282-83,285-87

deficits, government, 109, 282–83, 285–87

以及2007-08年金融危机的补救措施,第359-60

and remedies for financial crisis of 2007–08, 359–60

通货紧缩,98,151,272,368

deflation, 98, 151, 272, 368

丹尼尔·笛福,135

Defoe, Daniel, 135

德莱恩,约翰,88岁

Delane, John, 88

德洛尔,雅克,285

Delors, Jacques, 285

民主政体。参见 财产所有制民主政体代议制政府

democracies. See property-owning democracies; representative governments

美国民主党,391

Democratic Party (US), 391

人口统计数据,367、368、399、408

demographics, 367, 368, 399, 408

美国住房和城市发展部(HUD )244-45,386-87

Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), 244–45, 386–87

存款保险,53

deposit insurance, 53

折旧,241

depreciation, 241

抑郁症,151

depressions, 151

二战后缺失,151-52

absence of after Second World War, 151–52

大萧条时期的经济学,288

Depression economics, 288

另见 大萧条

See also Great Depression

放松管制,第347-48页第349页第350页

deregulation, 347–48, 349, 350

德伦伯格公司,274

Derenberg & Co., 274

衍生物5,208-9,325

derivatives, 5, 208–9, 325

以及2007 - 08年金融危机原因,349,352

and causes of financial crisis of 2007–08, 349, 352

当前水平为388、389

current levels of, 388, 389

危险209,325

dangers of, 209, 325

非处方药 OTC 5,209,325

‘over-the-counter’ (OTC), 5, 209, 325

激增209,304,308

surge in, 209, 304, 308

另见 期货合约互换

See also futures contracts; swaps

德里,乔治·H.博士,223

Derry, Dr George H., 223

德索托,埃尔南多,251-55

de Soto, Hernando, 251–55

底特律, 214 , 222 –25, 224 , 229 –30, 241 –44, 246 –47, 250 , 255 , 257 –58

Detroit, 214, 222–25, 224, 229–30, 241–44, 246–47, 250, 255, 257–58

申命记34章

Deuteronomy, 34

德意志银行,350,375

Deutsche Bank, 350, 375

发达国家4,14

developed countries, 4, 14

发展中国家。参见 新兴市场/发展中国家第三世界

developing countries. See emerging markets/developing countries; Third World

德文郡公爵,215-16

Devonshire, Dukes of, 215–16

戴蒙德,拉里,390

Diamond, Larry, 390

钻石,114颗

diamonds, 114

迪克森,吉姆,333 n

Dickson, Jim, 333n

迪法塔,约瑟夫,164

DiFatta, Joseph, 164

数字货币,401-5

digital money, 401–5

戴蒙,杰米346,402

Dimon, Jamie, 346, 402

《灾难资本主义复合体》,167-168

‘Disaster Capitalism Complex,’ 167–68

灾害,6,163-70,182,187,205-6

disasters, 6, 163–70, 182, 187, 205–6

对冲基金和,209

hedge funds and, 209

折扣店,276

discount houses, 276

折扣窗口,151

discount window, 151

谨慎, 40

discrezione, 40

分布式自治组织,405

Distributed Autonomous Organization, 405

分布曲线,173-74

distribution curves, 173–74

哥伦比亚特区,383

District of Columbia, 383

股息,115 –17,115 n ,240

dividends, 115–17, 115n, 240

迪克森,唐,234

Dixon, Don, 234

多德,克里斯,383

Dodd, Chris, 383

《多德-弗兰克法案》(华尔街改革和消费者保护法案),第382-85页第394页

Dodd-Frank (Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act), 382–85, 394

美元

dollar

法案,26-27、59、90、91

bills, 26–27, 59, 90, 91

中国306-7,310

China and, 306–7, 310

价值下跌27、59、291、310

falling value, 27, 59, 291, 310

作为国际储备货币280,282

as international reserve currency, 280, 282

词源,25

origin of word, 25

钉子,276

pegs, 276

.com热潮,6,115,260,402 泡沫

dot.com mania, 6, 115, 260, 402. See also bubbles

杜埃,69

Douai, 69

双鹰,292

Double Eagle, 292

道琼斯工业平均指数,6,114 –15,152

Dow Jones Industrial Average, 6, 114–15, 152

以及9/11事件,6

and 9/11, 6

1929年,146

1929, 146

1987年,152-54

1987, 152–54

1995–97,154

1995–97, 154

瀑布6,152

falls, 6, 152

马里奥·德拉吉,373 –74、376 –77

Draghi, Mario, 373–74, 376–77

德鲁肯米勒,斯坦利,293

Druckenmiller, Stanley, 293

药物成瘾265,268

drug addiction, 265, 268

达德利,威廉337,341

Dudley, WIlliam, 337, 341

邓科姆,托马斯,国会议员,73岁

Duncombe, Thomas, MP, 73

杜邦,148

DuPont, 148

荷兰东印度公司。参见 VOC

Dutch East India Company. See VOC

荷属东印度群岛,125-26

Dutch East Indies, 125–26

荷兰帝国,4,127,130 联合

Dutch Empire, 4, 127, 130. See also United Provinces

荷兰共和国,408另见 联合省。

Dutch Republic, 408. See also United Provinces

荷兰郁金香狂热,402

Dutch tulip mania, 402

地震162、168、187

earthquakes, 162, 168, 187

东非36,169

East Africa, 36, 169

东亚,第260、261另见 亚洲。

East Asia, 260, 261. See also Asia

东欧104,282,344

Eastern Europe, 104, 282, 344

东印度公司。参见 VOC

East India companies. See VOC

东印度公司(英国120、125、137、142、145

East India Company (British), 120, 125, 137, 142, 145

东印度群岛,118 – 19

East Indies, 118–19

电子商务,364

e-commerce, 364

经济杀手,284-85、288、293

economic hit men, 284–85, 288, 293

规模经济和范围经济,323-24

economies of scale and scope, 323–24

《经济学人》, 345页

Economist, The, 345

经济学家

economists

芝加哥和哈佛理论家,196-97,199-200

Chicago and Harvard theorists, 196–97, 199–200

经济预测,318

economic forecasting, 318

演化经济学,319-29

evolutionary economics, 319–29

以及大萧条,151

and Great Depression, 151

以及真正的人类,317

and real humans, 317

以及股票市场,117

and stock market, 117

厄瓜多尔1,18,157,284

Ecuador, 1, 18, 157, 284

爱丁堡174-75,258

Edinburgh, 174–75, 258

教育192,202

education, 192, 202

日本190,192,202

Japan, 190, 192, 202

202年公共支出

public expenditure on, 202

爱德华四世,国王,44岁

Edward IV, King, 44

埃吉比家族,29

Egibi family, 29

埃及,90,92,253,268,270,390

Egypt, 90, 92, 253, 268, 270, 390

艾尔鲍姆,罗伯托,104

Eilbaum, Roberto, 104

埃尔阿尔托255,257

El Alto, 255, 257

埃尔多拉多,20

El Dorado, 20

选举改革

electoral reform

英国,93、186、214、220-21

in Britain, 93, 186, 214, 220–21

在欧洲,93

in Europe, 93

另见 财产所有制民主

See also property-owning democracies

电力行业,157-59

electricity industry, 157–59

电子羊群。参见 投资者

electronic herd. See investors

电子货币,27-28

electronic money, 27–28

伊丽莎白二世,365

Elizabeth II, 365

埃利奥特,哈里,333 n

Elliott, Harry, 333n

萨尔瓦多201,253

El Salvador, 201, 253

应急货币,276-77

emergency currency, 276–77

新兴市场/发展中国家,4、13-14、251-58、260、264、282、284、297-98、305、308、331

emerging markets/developing countries, 4, 13–14, 251–58, 260, 264, 282, 284, 297–98, 305, 308, 331

新兴市场债券,6,107-8,299 n另见贫困贫穷国家)

emerging market bonds, 6, 107–8, 299n (see also poverty and poor countries)

帝国,第270、283-284、311页。帝国主义

empires, 270, 283–84, 311. See also imperialism

帝国储蓄贷款公司,234-37

Empire Savings and Loan, 234–37

就业,365

employment, 365

就业政策,第282页另见 失业问题。

employment policies, 282. See also unemployment

加密,404

encryption, 404

能源行业,156-59

energy industry, 156–59

放松管制157,158

deregulation, 157, 158

燃油价格上涨282,310

fuel price rises, 282, 310

另见 天然气工业石油

See also gas industry; oil

恩格斯,弗里德里希,17

Engels, Friedrich, 17

英格兰。参见 英国

England. See Britain

英语国家,102、261、311 英国财产

English-speaking countries, 102, 261, 311. See also Britain; property

安然155-60,206

Enron, 155–60, 206

企业区,305-6

enterprise zones, 305–6

企业家

entrepreneurs

以及破产,56-57

and bankruptcy, 56–57

以及资本,252

and capital, 252

以及恶性通货膨胀,98

and hyperinflation, 98

以及抵押贷款213,255

and mortgages, 213, 255

术语起源,135

origin of term, 135

女性255-57,305

women, 255–57, 305

环境问题,第205、261另见 气候变化灾害。

environmental issues, 205, 261. See also climate change; disasters

以弗所,23

Ephesus, 23

平等社会,192

equal societies, 192

权益。参见 股票(或股份、股权)。

equities. See shares (or stocks or equities)

公平

equity

返回,325

returns on, 325

风险溢价,117

risk premium, 117

Erlanger ( Emile )和公司,87,89

Erlanger (Emile) and Co., 87, 89

欧洲汇率机制( ERM)。参见欧洲汇率机制(ERM)。

ERM. See European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM)

以太坊,402,405

Ethereum, 402, 405

少数民族

ethnic minorities

提供金融服务3、33、35-36、39

providing financial services, 3, 33, 35–36, 39

另见 种族划分

See also race divisions

欧洲债券市场,282

Eurobond market, 282

欧洲美元存款,47

eurodollar deposits, 47

欧洲

Europe

联盟作为冲突的根源,279

alliances as cause of conflict, 279

银行与工业化,49-50

banks and industrialization, 49–50

布雷顿森林体系和,282

Bretton Woods and, 282

英国投资额,269

British investment in, 269

政府债券,297

government bonds, 297

政府借款,69-71

government borrowing, 69–71

列强与战争273,279

great powers and war, 273, 279

另见 东欧

See also Eastern Europe

欧洲中央银行(ECB )109、360、361、370、373-77、379-80

European Central Bank (ECB), 109, 360, 361, 370, 373–77, 379–80

欧洲委员会,374,379-80

European Commission, 374, 379–80

欧洲债务危机,370-80

European debt crisis, 370–80

欧洲汇率机制(ERM),292

European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), 292

欧洲金融危机,370 -80年

European financial crisis, 370–80

欧洲金融稳定基金,376

European Financial Stability Facility, 376

欧洲货币联盟,371

European monetary union, 371

欧洲议会,372

European Parliament, 372

欧洲稳定基金,376

European Stability Facility, 376

欧洲稳定机制,374

European Stability Mechanism, 374

欧盟

European Union (EU)

以及金融危机的后果390-91,399

and aftermath of financial crisis, 390–91, 399

以及英国脱欧,396

and Brexit, 396

以及2007-08年金融危机的原因,351

and causes of financial crisis of 2007–08, 351

以及欧洲债务危机370、371、373

and the European debt crisis, 370, 371, 373

欧元区,58

eurozone, 58

欧元区376,379,407

Eurozone, 376, 379, 407

埃文斯,查尔斯·L.,338

Evans, Charles L., 338

演化、金融史和15,49-54,318-30

evolution, financial history and, 15, 49–54, 318–30

近期进展,400-408

recent developments, 400–408

汇率

exchange rates

外汇管制,278

exchange controls, 278

第一次世界大战,274

and First World War, 274

固定值,280 –81

fixed, 280–81

浮动54,283,287

floating, 54, 283, 287

由市场决定,283

set by market, 283

稳定性54,151,272

stability, 54, 151, 272

另见 欧洲汇率机制(ERM)

See also European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM)

交易所交易基金(ETF 400,407

exchange-traded funds (ETFs), 400, 407

交易所交易票据(ETN)第十四期,400

exchange-traded note (ETN) XIV, 400

消费税。参见 税收。

excise. See taxes

域外管辖权,268

extraterritoriality, 268

福克兰群岛,103

Falkland Islands, 103

饥荒168,169

famines, 168, 169

房利(联邦国民抵押贷款协会10、228、230、238、242、245、250

Fannie Mae (Federal National Mortgage Association), 10, 228, 230, 238, 242, 245, 250

以及2007-08年金融危机的原因,352

and causes of financial crisis of 2007–08, 352

以及2007-08年的金融危机,333

and the financial crisis of 2007–08, 333

以及危机后的经济政策,87

and post-crisis economic policy, 87

以及2007-08年金融危机的补救措施,356

and remedies for financial crisis of 2007–08, 356

法西斯和极权政府,212,226

fascist and totalitarian governments, 212, 226

法斯托,安德鲁,159

Fastow, Andrew, 159

152,207

fat tails, 152, 207

福克纳丹尼 234-35,236,237

Faulkner, Danny, 234–35, 236, 237

fcs(“免于捕获和扣押”),186

f.c.s. (‘free of capture and seizure’), 186

联邦债务,395

federal debt, 395

联邦存款保险公司FDIC),335-36、356、383

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), 335–36, 356, 383

联邦紧急事务管理局(FEMA),164

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 164

联邦住房贷款银行委员会229,236

Federal Home Loan Bank Board, 229, 236

联邦住房贷款抵押公司。参见 房地美

Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation. See Freddie Mac

联邦住房管理局(FHA),227-28

Federal Housing Administration (FHA), 227–28

联邦住房金融局(FHFA),387

Federal Housing Finanace Agency (FHFA), 387

联邦国民抵押贷款协会。参见 房利美

Federal National Mortgage Association. See Fannie Mae

联邦公开市场委员会153-54n154,336

Federal Open Market Committee, 153–54n, 154, 336

《联邦储备法》第334-35

Federal Reserve Act, 334–35

波士顿联邦储备银行,337-38

Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 337–38

达拉斯联邦储备银行339,341

Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, 339, 341

明尼阿波利斯联邦储备银行,338

Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, 338

纽约联邦储备银行,149、333、342

Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 149, 333, 342

里士满联邦储备银行,339

Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, 339

联邦储备系统

Federal Reserve System

以及 1990 年代的狂热154-55,160

and 1990s euphoria, 154–55, 160

以及金融危机的后果394-95,396

and aftermath of financial crisis, 394–95, 396

以及《黑色星期一》(1987),152-53

and Black Monday (1987), 152–53

以及2007 - 08年金融危机的原因,352,353

and causes of financial crisis of 2007–08, 352, 353

对……的批评,149-51

criticisms of, 149–51

成立于53年

founding of, 53

短期利率上涨,108

increases in short-term rates, 108

以及长期资本救助,300

and Long Term Capital bail-out, 300

以及抵押贷款,244

and mortgages, 244

以及2007-08年金融危机的补救措施,第356页脚注,第358页,第360页

and remedies for financial crisis of 2007–08, 356n, 358, 360

罗斯柴尔德家族对80年代的所谓影响

Rothschilds’ alleged influence on, 80

目标率,9,153-54,154 n

target rate, 9, 153–54, 154n

以及华尔街股市崩盘/大萧条,149-51,194

and Wall Street Crash/Great Depression, 149–51, 194

另请参阅 特定银行

See also specific banks

联邦储蓄贷款保险公司(FSLIC),237

Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC), 237

费尔德斯坦,马丁,353

Feldstein, Martin, 353

费马,皮埃尔·德,172

Fermat, Pierre de, 172

费马资本,209

Fermat Capital, 209

封建制度,313

feudalism, 313

联邦住房管理局 ( FHA)。参见 联邦住房管理局 (FHA)。

FHA. See Federal Housing Administration (FHA)

斐波那契(比萨的列奥纳多),30 –32, 33

Fibonacci (Leonardo of Pisa), 30–32, 33

FICO 信用评分,387

FICO scores, 387

小说178,279

fiction, 178, 279

富达,334

Fidelity, 334

信托票据问题,51

fiduciary note issues, 51

金融危机,2、4、8-10、59-60、147、151、314、325

financial crises, 2, 4, 8–10, 59–60, 147, 151, 314, 325

2007 - 08年危机的后果,389-96

aftermath of 2007–08 crisis, 389–96

美国危机” /信贷紧缩,8-11,207,249-50,260,304脚注310,319,324-26

‘American crisis’/credit crunch, 8–11, 207, 249–50, 260, 304n, 310, 319, 324–26

亚洲(参见 亚洲

Asian (See Asia)

黑色星期一》(1987 147,152-53,299

‘Black Monday’ (1987), 147, 152–53, 299

2007-08年危机的原因,第333-46页第346-55

causes of 2007–08 crisis, 333–46, 346–55

逃避投资者的记忆,304,311-12

escaping investors’ memory-span, 304, 311–12

欧洲金融危机,370 -80年

European financial crisis, 370–80

第一次拉丁美洲债务危机(1826-1829 年),82、91、180脚注、264

first Latin American debt crisis (1826–9), 82, 91, 180n, 264

第一次世界大战期间,274 -79年

in First World War, 274–79

以及财政赤字,285-87

and fiscal deficits, 285–87

频率和不可预测3、15、304、311-12、314、319

frequency and unpredictability of, 3, 15, 304, 311–12, 314, 319

国际后果,388

international consequences of, 388

国际影响,260,311-12

international effects of, 260, 311–12

凯恩斯论,300

Keynes on, 300

以及雷曼兄弟破产案,333-46

and Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, 333–46

可能的地点,260

likely locations for, 260

流动性危机51,51 n ,275-77,319

liquidity crises, 51, 51n, 275–77, 319

以及政治反弹,389-96

and political backlash, 389–96

以及监管环境,380-89

and regulatory environment, 380–89

2007 - 08年危机的补救措施,355-69

remedies for 2007–08 crisis, 355–69

储蓄贷款,232-39、295、321、324、325、328-29

Savings & Loan, 232–39, 295, 321, 324, 325, 328–29

第二次拉丁美洲债务危机(20世纪80年代),第264-265页第282页

second Latin American debt crisis (1980s), 264–65, 282

以及中美经济关系,396-400

and Sino-American economic relations, 396–400

总成本为345

total cost of, 345

另见: 泡沫大萧条通货膨胀

See also bubbles; Great Depression; inflation

金融史,315 n

financial history, 315n

金融创新,第388-389页另见 金融体系。

financial innovations, 388–89. See also financial system

金融服务。参见 金融体系

financial services. See financial system

金融稳定理事会,381

Financial Stability Board, 381

金融稳定论坛,381

Financial Stability Forum, 381

金融体系

financial system

绝对主义理论,130

absolutist theories, 130

益处3-4,314

benefits of, 3–4, 314

进化灭绝和破坏,15,49-54,55-57,249-50,319-22,323,324,325-26,327,329-30

evolutionary extinctions and destruction in, 15, 49–54, 55–57, 249–50, 319–22, 323, 324, 325–26, 327, 329–30

金融服务,325,328-29

financial services, 325, 328–29

“大灭绝”情景,15

‘great dying’ scenario, 15

对……无知,290,300

ignorance of, 290, 300

创新,3,7,49-50,273,279,313,321-23

innovations, 3, 7, 49–50, 273, 279, 313, 321–23

稳定性290,313-28

instability of, 290, 313–28

金融市场一体化,14

integration of financial markets, 14

“智能设计”见50,328

‘intelligent design’ in, 50, 328

“怪物”​​或人类的镜子,332

‘monster’ or mirror of mankind, 332

参见 法规/监管机构

See regulation/regulators

《金融时报》, 第381页

Financial Times, 381

金融家

financiers

性别失衡,6

gender imbalance, 6

毕业生和,6

graduates and, 6

……的敌对观点,3,14

hostile views of, 3, 14

火灾,171-72

fire, 171–72

公司。参见 公司

firms. See companies

财政契约,373

Fiscal Compact, 373

财政政策,367

fiscal policy, 367

Fisher,Irving146,148

Fisher, Irving, 146, 148

费舍尔,理查德339,341

Fisher, Richard, 339, 341

惠誉,385

Fitch, 385

菲钦,于尔根,375

Fitschen, Jürgen, 375

弗兰德斯,69

Flanders, 69

佛罗伦萨,31、33、65-68、172

Florence, 31, 33, 65–68, 172

以及债券,65-68

and bonds, 65–68

以及货币的演变,408

and evolution of money, 408

在美第奇家族统治下,公元39 -44年

under the Medici, 39–44

税务和财务记录42、66、68

taxes and financial records, 42, 66, 68

弗洛雷斯,贝蒂,255-56

Flores, Betty, 255–56

浮选,145

flotations, 145

FOMC,第337、338、341-342、第356页脚注第358页

FOMC, 337, 338, 341–42, 356n, 358

食品价格,25、215、261、310 谷物

food prices, 25, 215, 261, 310. See also grain

福特,埃德塞尔222,225

Ford, Edsel, 222, 225

福特,亨利56-57,222

Ford, Henry, 56–57, 222

福特汽车公司,222

Ford Motor Company, 222

预测。参见 经济学家。

forecasting. See economists

止赎,第352-353页另见 抵押贷款。

foreclosures, 352–53. See also mortgages

外汇交易商和市场,5

foreign exchange dealers and markets, 5

早期40,44,45

early, 40, 44, 45

第一次世界大战,275

and First World War, 275

伪造,90

forgery, 90

远期合约,207

forward contracts, 207

401(k)计划,12

401(k) plans, 12

部分准备金银行制度,46-48

fractional reserve banking, 46–48

法国212,279

France, 212, 279

银行52,131

banks, 52, 131

债券,81、94、272、277

bonds, 81, 94, 272, 277

货币131,143

currency, 131, 143

财务困难,4,70-71,117-18,128-45

financial difficulties in, 4, 70–71, 117–18, 128–45

以及第一次世界大战,94、277、279

and First World War, 94, 277, 279

政府破产,128

government bankruptcies, 128

在拿破仑统治时期,75-79 年另见 拿破仑战争

under Napoleon, 75–79 (see also Napoleonic Wars)

海外属地和贸易,130-31,136 路易斯安那

overseas possessions and trade, 130–31, 136 (see also Louisiana)

以及后危机时代的全球经济,366

and post-crisis global economy, 366

房地产价格飙升,214

property price boom, 214

rentes69,92-93,277

rentes, 69, 92–93, 277

革命117,143

Revolution, 117, 143

皇家资助69、71、128-29、141-43

royal funding, 69, 71, 128–29, 141–43

股市,143

stock market, 143

税收71、132、136

taxes, 71, 132, 136

以及美国,282

and US, 282

选举权扩大。参见 选举改革

franchise, widening of. See electoral reform

弗兰克,巴尼,383

Frank, Barney, 383

欺诈和不当行为

fraud and misconduct

气泡和,155-60

bubbles and, 155–60

引发敌意,3

causing hostility, 3

对冲基金,302-3

hedge funds, 302–3

储蓄贷款,234-37

Savings and Loan, 234–37

股票市场114,147

stock market, 114, 147

另见 安然

See also Enron

房地美(联邦住房贷款抵押公司10、230、238、245、250

Freddie Mac (Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation), 10, 230, 238, 245, 250

以及2007-08年金融危机的原因,352

and causes of financial crisis of 2007–08, 352

以及2007-08年的金融危机,333

and the financial crisis of 2007–08, 333

以及危机后的经济政策,387

and post-crisis economic policy, 387

自由贸易,第281、311另见 保护主义。

free trade, 281, 311. See also protectionism

法国大革命。参见 法国

French Revolution. See France

弗里德曼,米尔顿,195

Friedman, Milton, 195

智利194-96,199

and Chile, 194–96, 199

以及中国,196 n

and China, 196n

以及2007-08年的金融危机,341

and the financial crisis of 2007–08, 341

关于大萧条,第149页第151页

on Great Depression, 149, 151

关于通货膨胀,93、97、194

on inflation, 93, 97, 194

以及2007 - 08年金融危机的补救措施,355,360

and remedies for financial crisis of 2007–08, 355, 360

以及福利国家194,196

and welfare state, 194, 196

联邦 储蓄贷款保险公司(FSLIC)。

FSLIC. See Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation

富时全股指数,240

FTSE All Share index, 240

燃料。参见 能源行业

fuel. See energy industry

藤森,阿尔贝托,253

Fujimori, Alberto, 253

富尔德,理查德·S.,2

Fuld, Richard S., 2

货币的可互换性,23

fungibility of money, 23

毛皮贸易,136

fur trade, 136

期货合约207,313

futures contracts, 207, 313

作为衍生物,208-9

as derivatives, 208–9

养老基金和,114

pension funds and, 114

“到达”合同,207

‘to arrive’ contracts, 207

加文,理查德,205

Garwin, Richard, 205

天然气工业111,156-57

gas industry, 111, 156–57

盖茨,比尔和梅琳达,256 n

Gates, Bill and Melinda, 256n

盖茨,亨利·路易斯(“斯基普”)二世,245-46,254

Gates, Henry Louis (‘Skip’) Jr., 245–46, 254

国内生产总值(GDP)。参见 国内生产总值。

GDP. See gross domestic product

杠杆率(资产与资本之比),296

gearing (assets vs. capital), 296

盖特纳,蒂姆335,342,363

Geithner, Tim, 335, 342, 363

通用汽车,148

General Motors, 148

金融体系中的“基因”,321-22

‘genes’ in financial system, 321–22

日内瓦,40

Geneva, 40

热那亚,41,68,69,81,127

Genoa, 41, 68, 69, 81, 127

与金融史相比,地质学,315 n

geology, compared with financial history, 315n

乔治,亨利,211

George, Henry, 211

德国州立银行,350 –51

German Landesbanken, 350–51

德国,82,134,212,268

Germany, 82, 134, 212, 268

银行,52

banks, 52

债券证券,272,277-78

bonds and securities, 272, 277–78

以及英国金融体系172,311

and British financial system, 172, 311

2007-08年金融危机期间的经济,355

economy during financial crisis of 2007–08, 355

以及欧洲债务危机370-79,372

and the European debt crisis, 370–79, 372

出口量,96 -97年

exports, 96–97

以及第一次世界大战94-100、98、277-78、279

and First World War, 94–100, 98, 277–78, 279

恶性通货膨胀经济萧条94-100,98,105,146,277

hyperinflation and slump, 94–100, 98, 105, 146, 277

保险172,183

insurance, 172, 183

以及对伊朗的制裁,407

and Iran sanctions, 407

民族团结运动,85

national unity movements, 85

房地产和土地投资,212

property and land investments, 212

帝国银行,53

Reichsbank, 53

赔偿95-96,147,278

reparations, 95–96, 147, 278

统一成本,292

reunification costs, 292

皇家财政,70

royal finance, 70

以及次级抵押贷款,8

and subprime mortgages, 8

泰勒, 25

thaler, 25

魏玛共和国,95 -96年,105年

Weimar Republic, 95–96, 105

福利制度,184-86

welfare system, 184–86

加纳,253

Ghana, 253

根特,69

Ghent, 69

鬼城,163

ghost towns, 163

GIC,309 n

GIC, 309n

金边证券,277另见 永久债券。

gilt-edged securities, 277. See also consols

吉尼梅(政府国民抵押贷款协会230、238、250

Ginnie Mae (Government National Mortgage Association), 230, 238, 250

乔瓦尼·菲奥伦蒂诺,32岁

Giovanni Fiorentino, 32

格拉德斯通 WE ,88,91-92,93

Gladstone, W. E., 88, 91–92, 93

格拉斯哥,214,257-58

Glasgow, 214, 257–58

高利贷者,14,36-38,38,55,59,257

loan sharks, 14, 36–38, 38, 55, 59, 257

信贷网络的需求,14、38、59

need for credit networks, 14, 38, 59

格拉斯曼,詹姆斯·K.,115

Glassman, James K., 115

《格拉斯-斯蒂格尔法案》第348条

Glass-Steagall Act, 348

全球金融危机。参见 金融危机。

global financial crisis. See financial crises

全球治理,361

global governance, 361

全球化,4-5,57,259,309

globalization, 4–5, 57, 259, 309

以及冲突,311-12

and conflict, 311–12

定义,263

defined, 263

第一时期,263-64、265、268-69、271、279、311

first era of, 263–64, 265, 268–69, 271, 279, 311

反对,283

opposition to, 283

另见 主权财富基金

See also sovereign wealth funds

全球变暖。参见 气候变化

global warming. See climate change

戈培尔,约瑟夫,75岁

Goebbels, Joseph, 75

黄金,52,90,101,138,272-73

gold, 52, 90, 101, 138, 272–73

硬币23,275

coins, 23, 275

征服者们,以及19-20世纪

conquistadors and, 19–20

以及大萧条,149-51

and Great Depression, 149–51

印加帝国,19-20

Incas and, 19–20

产量增加52,273

increased production, 52, 273

作为国际储备货币,280

as international reserve currency, 280

以及密西西比泡沫138 –39,141

and Mississippi Bubble, 138–39, 141

在拿破仑战争时期,76 -79年

in Napoleonic Wars, 76–79

养老基金和,114

pension funds and, 114

储备,52,149-51,275-76,280

reserves, 52, 149–51, 275–76, 280

另见 金本位制

See also gold standard

戈德堡,乌比,245

Goldberg, Whoopi, 245

黄金分割,30

golden mean, 30

高盛, 1 , 2 , 26 , 148 , 260 –61 , 294 , 300 , 304 n , 327

Goldman Sachs, 1, 2, 26, 148, 260–61, 294, 300, 304n, 327

以及金融危机的后果,391

and aftermath of financial crisis, 391

以及2007-08年金融危机的原因,第346-47页第349页第351页

and causes of financial crisis of 2007–08, 346–47, 349, 351

以及雷曼兄弟破产案,337

and Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, 337

以及2007-08年金融危机的演变,335

and progression of financial crisis of 2007–08, 335

金本位54,58,270

gold standard, 54, 58, 270

英国和,51-53,70,149

Britain and, 51–53, 70, 149

以及1914年的危机,275-76

and crisis of 1914, 275–76

金本位制,375

gold exchange standard, 375

两次世界大战之间的时期149,151

inter-war years, 149, 151

凯恩斯论,54

Keynes on, 54

租金, 93

and rentes, 93

传播范围为270、272、275

spread of, 270, 272, 275

美国放弃,282

US abandonment of, 282

以及华尔街股市崩盘,149

and Wall Street Crash, 149

戈登,罗伯特,367-68

Gordon, Robert, 367–68

戈迪,贝瑞,229

Gordy, Berry, 229

戈尔,阿尔,109

Gore, Al, 109

《难以忽视的真相》, 205-206

An Inconvenient Truth, 205–6

政府债券,81、93、107、268-71、272、297、313

government bonds, 81, 93, 107, 268–71, 272, 297, 313

政府债务,376

government debt, 376

政府国民抵押贷款协会。参见 吉尼梅(政府国民抵押贷款协会)。

Government National Mortgage Association. See Ginnie Mae (Government National Mortgage Association)

政府支持企业(GSE),230,238-39

government sponsored enterprises (GSEs), 230, 238–39

政府支持实体(GSE),333

government-sponsored entities (GSEs), 333

以及2007-08年金融危机的原因,352

and causes of financial crisis of 2007–08, 352

以及危机后的经济政策,387

and post-crisis economic policy, 387

另见 房利美(联邦国民抵押贷款协会)房地美(联邦住房贷款抵押公司)

See also Fannie Mae (Federal National Mortgage Association); Freddie Mac (Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation)

毕业生,6

graduates, 6

谷物,26,207,216-18

grain, 26, 207, 216–18

格莱珉(“乡村”)银行,256

Grameen (‘Village’) Bank, 256

格拉姆,菲尔参议员,157

Gramm, Senator Phil, 157

格朗特,约翰,173

Graunt, John, 173

Gray, Edwin J., 236 –37

Gray, Edwin J., 236–37

大萧条,53、147、149、151、160、189、212、237、278、301、325

Great Depression, 53, 147, 149, 151, 160, 189, 212, 237, 278, 301, 325

与2007 - 08金融危机相比,339、341、342、344、368

compared with financial crisis of 2007–08, 339, 341, 342, 344, 368

以及房屋所有权,221-26

and home ownership, 221–26

另见 失业

See also unemployment

大火(1666 年),171

Great Fire (1666), 171

严重的通货膨胀。参见 通货膨胀

Great Inflation. See inflation

大衰退,390-91

Great Recession, 390–91

《愚行大戏》 136、142

Great Scene of Folly, The, 136, 142

希腊,272

Greece, 272

以及金融危机的后果,396

and aftermath of financial crisis, 396

以及银行监管,382

and banking regulation, 382

2007-08年金融危机期间的经济,355

economy during financial crisis of 2007–08, 355

以及2007 - 08年金融危机的影响,345,346

and effects of financial crisis of 2007–08, 345, 346

以及欧洲债务危机,370-80

and the European debt crisis, 370–80

“希腊退出欧盟”,374

‘Grexit,’ 374

贪婪,347

greed, 347

格林斯潘,艾伦,155

Greenspan, Alan, 155

以及2008年危机,15

and 2008 crisis, 15

以及《黑色星期一》(1987),153-54

and Black Monday (1987), 153–54

债券市场61,109-10

on bond market, 61, 109–10

以及安然公司,155-56

and Enron, 155–56

关于“非理性繁荣”,第112-113页第154页第155-156页第258页

on ‘irrational exuberance,’ 112–13, 154, 155–56, 258

以及抵押贷款危机,244

and mortgage crisis, 244

成功次数,155-56

successes of, 155–56

以及科技泡沫,155-56

and technology bubble, 155–56

康涅狄格州格林威治,294

Greenwich, Connecticut, 294

“希腊退出欧盟”,374

‘Grexit,’ 374

格里芬肯尼斯· C .2,206-8,302-3,326

Griffin, Kenneth C., 2, 206–8, 302–3, 326

格林斯潘,贝尔纳多,104

Grinspun, Bernardo, 104

格罗斯,威廉64,100

Gross, William, 64, 100

国内生产总值(GDP)

gross domestic product (GDP)

国际金融危机的后果,388

consequences of international financial crises, 388

以及欧洲债务危机378,379

and the European debt crisis, 378, 379

金融部门和,5-6,183

financial sectors and, 5–6, 183

国际数据,193-94,261-62,314

international data, 193–94, 261–62, 314

以及2007-08年金融危机的补救措施,369

and remedies for financial crisis of 2007–08, 369

以及金融危机期间的美国经济,354

and US economy during financial crisis, 354

美国公共债务水平为397。

and US public debt levels, 397

群体思维,352

groupthink, 352

增长经济),30,59,314

growth (economic), 30, 59, 314

政府支持企业( GSE)。参见 政府支持企业(GSE)。

GSEs. See government sponsored enterprises (GSEs)

瓜尔帕,迭戈,20

Gualpa, Diego, 20

广州(Canton),265-67

Guangzhou (Canton), 265–67

危地马拉1,91

Guatemala, 1, 91

圭恰尔迪尼,弗朗切斯科,43岁

Guicciardini, Francesco, 43

哈布斯堡帝国4,278

Habsburg Empire, 4, 278

哈加尼,维克多,296

Haghani, Victor, 296

“理发”,107

‘haircuts,’ 107

海地252,253

Haiti, 252, 253

哈雷,埃德蒙173,177

Halley, Edmund, 173, 177

汉堡,北171

Hamburg, 171n

汉密尔顿,亚历山大,26岁

Hamilton, Alexander, 26

《汉谟拉比法典》第29章

Hammurabi, 29

汉森,阿尔文,366

Hansen, Alvin, 366

哈佛大学6,205

Harvard, 6, 205

经济理论197,199

economic theories, 197, 199

金钱游戏,46

money game, 46

哈维,《硬币》,84

Harvey, ‘Coin,’ 84

哈塞特,凯文·A.,115

Hassett, Kevin A., 115

霍斯,安娜夫人,71-72

Hawes, Mrs Anna, 71–72

霍克伍德,约翰爵士,66岁

Hawkwood, Sir John, 66

健康保险,169,184-86,201-2,210​​

health insurance, 169, 184–86, 201–2, 210

“希伯来护身符”,80

‘Hebrew talisman,’ 80

对冲基金,2,5,206-10,293,296,301-2,308

hedge funds, 2, 5, 206–10, 293, 296, 301–2, 308

以及2007-08年金融危机的原因,347

and causes of financial crisis of 2007–08, 347

动态对冲,297

dynamic hedging, 297

进化变化,328 n

evolutionary change, 328n

爆炸,5,288,302-4,308-9

explosion of, 5, 288, 302–4, 308–9

基金中的基金,302

funds of funds, 302

历史,5,207-8,321

history, 5, 207–8, 321

展望302-4,326,328

outlook for, 302–4, 326, 328

以及主要经纪商,322

and prime brokers, 322

定量,296-301

quantitative, 296–301

以及2007-08年金融危机的补救措施,362

and remedies for financial crisis of 2007–08, 362

以及次级贷款,249-50

and subprime loans, 249–50

对冲,382

hedging, 382

海涅,海因里希79,83

Heine, Heinrich, 79, 83

海因茨,约翰·亨利,56岁

Heinz, John Henry, 56

海森堡,维尔纳,289

Heisenberg, Werner, 289

赫尔维格,马丁,381 n

Hellwig, Martin, 381n

赫拉克利特,64

Heraclitus, 64

遗产银行,351

Heritable Bank, 351

赫里斯,约翰·查尔斯,76-78

Herries, John Charles, 76–78

赫斯塔特银行,339

Herstatt Bank, 339

启发式偏差316-18,317-18

heuristic biases, 316–18, 317–18

海登,彼得·范德,65岁

Heyden, Pieter van der, 65

希尔弗丁,鲁道夫,323

Hilferding, Rudolf, 323

希利布兰德,拉里,296

Hilibrand, Larry, 296

伊斯帕尼奥拉岛,19 n

Hispaniola, 19n

霍布斯,托马斯,18

Hobbes, Thomas, 18

Hobson, JA, 84 n

Hobson, J. A., 84n

荷兰。参见 荷兰帝国荷兰联合省

Holland. See Dutch Empire; Netherlands, The; United Provinces

霍姆,亚历克·道格拉斯-霍姆,第十四代伯爵,215

Home, Alec Douglas-Home, 14th Earl of, 215

主场偏见258,282

home biases, 258, 282

房屋净值提取,243

home equity extraction, 243

房主负担能力和稳定性计划 (HASP),358

Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan (HASP), 358

房主救济计划,353

homeowner relief program, 353

洪都拉斯,253

Honduras, 253

香港, 267 –68, 271 , 305 , 366

Hong Kong, 267–68, 271, 305, 366

苏萨的霍斯蒂恩西斯(亨利),67 岁

Hostiensis (Henry) of Susa, 67

热钱,95,148,280,283,285,288

hot money, 95, 148, 280, 283, 285, 288

家庭债务和收入,57、258、314另见消费者金融和信贷。

household debt and income, 57, 258, 314. See also consumer finance and credit

房价。查看 房产/房地产

house prices. See property/real estate

汇丰银行,249

HSBC, 249

美国住房和城市发展部(HUD)。参见 美国住房和城市发展部。

HUD. See Department of Housing and Urban Development

胡夫施密德,汉斯,296

Hufschmid, Hans, 296

匈牙利,99-100,268,278,344

Hungary, 99–100, 268, 278, 344

饥饿游行222,224

hunger marches, 222, 224

狩猎采集者,17-18

hunter-gatherers, 17–18

飓风,163-68,183,205-6

hurricanes, 163–68, 183, 205–6

侯赛因,萨达姆,162

Hussein, Saddam, 162

恶性通货膨胀90、94-100、98、277通货膨胀。

hyperinflation, 90, 94–100, 98, 277. See also inflation

IBM,148

IBM, 148

冰岛351,371

Iceland, 351, 371

流动不足51,51n251,329

illiquidity, 51, 51n, 251, 329

国际货币基金组织(IMF)。参见 国际货币基金组织。

IMF. See International Monetary Fund

模仿者,生成,325

imitators, generating, 325

移民263-64,392

immigration, 263–64, 392

帝国主义270、279、283、313帝国;新帝国主义

imperialism, 270, 279, 283, 313. See also empires; neo-imperialism

印加帝国,19-21

Incas, 19–21

个人收入

incomes (personal)

国际数据,1,261-62,269-70,306-8

international data, 1, 261–62, 269–70, 306–8

提供安全保障,255

providing security, 255

印度

India

英帝国,以及263、271

British Empire and, 263, 271

安然公司和,159

Enron and, 159

出口量,90,265

exports, 90, 265

以及全球化,263

and globalization, 263

“印度式”数学,30

‘Indian method’ of mathematics, 30

国际投资,159,263

international investment in, 159, 263

小额信贷,257

microfinance in, 257

房地产价格,214

property prices, 214

纺织品125,263

textiles, 125, 263

另见 金砖国家

See also BRICs

印度尼西亚,287

Indonesia, 287

工业投资银行,52家

industrial investment banks, 52

工业革命49,261-63

industrial revolution, 49, 261–63

工业/工业化,215,329

industry/industrialization, 215, 329

条件,261-62

conditions for, 261–62

进化过程,320-21

evolutionary processes in, 320–21

金融3,49,52

finance and, 3, 49, 52

不等式,367

inequality, 367

推断,173-74

inference, 173–74

通货膨胀

inflation

在美国内战中,90

in American Civil War, 90

资产价格与消费者价格,154-55

asset-price vs. consumer price, 154–55

以及债券(参见 债券和债券市场

and bonds (see bonds and bond markets)

定义,93

definition, 93

落入,107-8

fall in, 107–8

以及2007 - 08年金融危机341、349、394、395-96

and the financial crisis of 2007–08, 341, 349, 394, 395–96

以及第一次世界大战93-100,277

and First World War, 93–100, 277

大通货膨胀(1970年代101,107

Great Inflation (1970s), 101, 107

历史25,59,126 n ,272

historic, 25, 59, 126n, 272

密西西比泡沫队,138-40

and Mississippi Bubble, 138–40

货币供应93,193-94

and money supply, 93, 193–94

以及抵押贷款,232

and mortgages, 232

油价上涨,282

and oil price rises, 282

以及养老金,108

and pensions, 108

政治原因,97,102

political causes, 97, 102

利率分别59、99、100

rates, 59, 99, 100

以及股票市场,126 n

and stock markets, 126n

以及战争93-100,277-78

and war, 93–100, 277–78

另见 恶性通货膨胀滞胀

See also hyperinflation; stagflation

基础设施,364

infrastructure, 364

首次代币发行(ICO)401-2,405

initial coin offerings (ICOs), 401–2, 405

首次公开募股(IPO),148

initial public offerings (IPOs), 148

创新、金融388-89、402

innovation, financial, 388–89, 402

内幕交易,113-14,148

insider dealings, 113–14, 148

破产,51 n,329另见 破产案。

insolvency, 51n, 329. See also bankruptcies

自由与民主研究所,253

Institute for Liberty and Democracy, 253

国际金融协会,366

Institute of International Finance, 366

机构投资者,181

institutional investors, 181

保险162-210,313

insurance, 162–210, 313

事故,169

accident, 169

以及《美国危机》(2007),326

and ‘American crisis’ (2007), 326

猫债券,209

cat bonds as, 209

合同,171

contracts, 171

联邦存款,227-28

federal deposit, 227–28

火灾,171-72

fire, 171–72

健康(参见 健康保险

health (see health insurance)

历史,170-83,187-89

history, 170–83, 187–89

保险公司作为投资者181-82,216

insurance companies as investors, 181–82, 216

生命,172

life, 172

最大值原理,177-78

maximum principle, 177–78

投保率最高的国家(英国),4,183

most insured country (Britain), 4, 183

互惠原则,178

mutuality principle, 178

以及老年,169

and old age, 169

按需付费方式,172、175、192-93、197

pay-as-you-go basis, 172, 175, 192–93, 197

保单持有人处于不利地位,165-66,182-83

policy-holders disadvantaged, 165–66, 182–83

以及危机后的经济政策,385

and post-crisis economic policy, 385

保费占GDP的比例,183

premiums as proportion of GDP, 183

财产和意外伤害,164-68

property and casualty, 164–68

公共/167,186

public/state, 167, 186

风险评估,172-74

risk evaluation, 172–74

航运(参见 海上保险

shipping (see marine insurance)

小字条款除外,165 n

small-print exclusions, 165n

士兵人数,178-79

for soldiers, 178–79

以及美国经济的胜利,4

and US economic triumph, 4

战争172,186-87,206

war and, 172, 186–87, 206

福利国家和,183,210

welfare state and, 183, 210

另见 对冲基金

See also hedge funds

金融演化中的“智能设计50,328

‘intelligent design’ in financial evolution, 50, 328

银行间交易。参见 银行

interbank transactions. See banks

兴趣

interest

计算结果为,29、31-33

calculation of, 29, 31–33

作为风险补偿,32-33

as compensation for risk, 32–33

起源,29,66-67

origins of, 29, 66–67

利率(参见 利率

rates (see interest rates)

证券化,313

securitization of, 313

《利益均衡法》第281条

Interest Equalization Act, 281

利率

interest rates

以及金融危机的后果,395-96

and aftermath of financial crisis, 395–96

中国和,307-8

China and, 307–8

以及欧洲债务危机,371

and the European debt crisis, 371

敲诈勒索35,36-38,257

extortionate, 35, 36–38, 257

以及恶性通货膨胀,98

and hyperinflation, 98

以及财产所有权,232,246-47

and property ownership, 232, 246–47

以及对2007-08年金融危机的应对措施,第342-43

and responses to financial crisis of 2007–08, 342–43

由市场决定,283

set by market, 283

交换5,208-9,297

swaps, 5, 208–9, 297

以及美中贸易关系,364

and US-China trade relations, 364

国际复兴开发银行。参见 世界银行

International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. See World Bank

国际合作,355

international cooperation, 355

国际开发协会。参见 世界银行

International Development Association. See World Bank

国际金融体系,387-89

international financial system, 387–89

国际货币基金组织(IMF)

International Monetary Fund (IMF)

以及金融危机的后果393,397

and aftermath of financial crisis, 393, 397

阿根廷,106

and Argentina, 106

以及亚洲金融危机(1997-1998),285-287

and Asian crisis (1997–8), 285–87

以及2007-08年金融危机的原因,349

and causes of financial crisis of 2007–08, 349

以及2007 - 08年金融危机的后果,344-45

and consequences of financial crisis of 2007–08, 344–45

以及欧洲债务危机378,379-80

and the European debt crisis, 378, 379–80

成立于281年

founding of, 281

贷款及条件,283-85

loans and conditions, 283–85

反对,283-89

opposition to, 283–89

以及后危机时代的全球经济,366

and post-crisis global economy, 366

作为美国代理人,283-85

as US agents, 283–85

互联网,153

Internet, 153

银行业,324

banking, 324

安然公司和,157,159

Enron and, 157, 159

另见加密货币;.com热潮

See also cryptocurrencies; dot.com mania

不变性,失败,317

invariance, failure of, 317

投资

investment

国际,265,268-69,271-78,281-83,305-6

international, 265, 268–69, 271–78, 281–83, 305–6

信托,148

trusts, 148

《投资公司法》第288

Investment Company Act, 288n

投资级证券,82

investment grade securities, 82

投资者

investors

作为“电子群体113,293

as ‘electronic herd,’ 113, 293

以及金融危机9,311-12

and financial crises, 9, 311–12

以及抵押贷款216,240

and mortgages, 216, 240

私人,113-14,148,216,268-69,271-72

private, 113–14, 148, 216, 268–69, 271–72

波动性和偏差7、14、290、315-19

volatility and biases of, 7, 14, 290, 315–19

首次公开募股( IPO)。参见 首次公开募股(IPO)。

IPOs. See initial public offerings (IPOs)

伊朗,407

Iran, 407

伊拉克6,162,338

Iraq, 6, 162, 338

爱尔兰

Ireland

以及2007-08年金融危机的影响,345

and effects of financial crisis of 2007–08, 345

以及欧洲债务危机370、371、378、380

and the European debt crisis, 370, 371, 378, 380

爱尔兰214,271

Ireland, 214, 271

非理性繁荣。参见 艾伦·格林斯潘

irrational exuberance. See Greenspan, Alan

伊斯兰帝国,24

Islamic Empire, 24

以色列282,291

Israel, 282, 291

意大利212,268

Italy, 212, 268

人口老龄化,108-9

ageing population, 108–9

以及银行监管,382

and banking regulation, 382

银行系统,4,45,48

banking system, 4, 45, 48

债券市场,62,65-69,108-9

bond market, 62, 65–69, 108–9

以及2007-08年金融危机的影响,345

and effects of financial crisis of 2007–08, 345

以及欧洲中央银行,109

and European Central Bank, 109

以及欧洲债务危机,370、371、376、377、378

and the European debt crisis, 370, 371, 376, 377, 378

金融史,30-36,38-45,94,108-9

financial history, 30–36, 38–45, 94, 108–9

保险,170

insurance, 170

民族团结运动,85

national unity movements, 85

房地产价格飙升,214

property price boom, 214

生活多美好227、228、239

It’s a Wonderful Life, 227, 228, 239

詹姆斯二世,国王,70岁

James II, King, 70

日本,53,61-62,125,187-93,288,291

Japan, 53, 61–62, 125, 187–93, 288, 291

以及金融危机的后果,396

and aftermath of financial crisis, 396

人口老龄化与养老金191-93,203-4

ageing population and pensions, 191–93, 203–4

经济学,62,155,192,203-4,329

economy, 62, 155, 192, 203–4, 329

以及2007-08年的金融危机,344

and financial crisis of 2007–08, 344

以及2007 - 08的金融危机,338、339、340

and the financial crisis of 2007–08, 338, 339, 340

政府债券62,268,297

government bonds, 62, 268, 297

保险,187-93

insurance, 187–93

房地产价格,241

property prices, 241

第二次世界大战189,271

in Second World War, 189, 271

中国的战争189、191、271

wars with China, 189, 191, 271

福利国家187-93,203-4

welfare state, 187–93, 203–4

贾丁,威廉,265-68,266

Jardine, William, 265–68, 266

怡和洋行265-68

Jardine Matheson, 265–68

犹太人,81 n,92

Jews, 81n, 92

放债人,32-36

moneylenders, 32–36

罗斯柴尔德家族(参见 罗斯柴尔德家族和公司

Rothschilds (see Rothschild family and firm)

在威尼斯,32-36

in Venice, 32–36

另见 反犹主义

See also anti-Semitism

希瓦罗人,18

Jivaro people, 18

批发商,274

jobbers, 274

股份制银行/公司,46、52、112、118-22、160、273、274-75

joint-stock banks/companies, 46, 52, 112, 118–22, 160, 273, 274–75

琼斯,阿尔弗雷德·温斯洛,288 n

Jones, Alfred Winslow, 288n

摩根大通2,299 n ,300,333-34,346,402

JP Morgan, 2, 299n, 300, 333–34, 346, 402

宝盛集团,296

Julius Baer, 296

卡菲尔(金矿)气泡,272

Kaffir (gold mine) bubble, 272

卡恩,赫尔曼,192

Kahn, Herman, 192

卡尼曼,丹尼尔,316-17

Kahnemann, Daniel, 316–17

卡斯特,米格尔,197

Kast, Miguel, 197

卡特里娜(飓风163-68,201,205-6

Katrina (Hurricane), 163–68, 201, 205–6

凯,约翰,303

Kay, John, 303

哈萨克斯坦201,253

Kazakhstan, 201, 253

基廷,查尔斯,236 n

Keating, Charles, 236n

肯尼亚,257

Kenya, 257

凯恩斯约翰·梅纳德/凯恩斯主义54,98-99,147,269,270,280,300​​

Keynes, John Maynard/Keynesianism, 54, 98–99, 147, 269, 270, 280, 300

以及2007 - 08年的金融危机,339-40

and the financial crisis of 2007–08, 339–40

关于通货膨胀,98-99,107

on inflation, 98–99, 107

凯恩斯主义政策,104,287

Keynesian policies, 104, 287

以及2007-08年金融危机补救措施355、358-59、360、366、368

and remedies for financial crisis of 2007–08, 355, 358–59, 360, 366, 368

关于不确定性,315-16

on uncertainty, 315–16

基辅,390

Kiev, 390

金,默380,381

King, Mervyn, 380, 381

克莱因,娜奥米,167

Klein, Naomi, 167

奈特,弗兰克,314

Knight, Frank, 314

近藤文治,190

Kondo, Bunji, 190

韩国,405

Korea, 405

韩国开发银行,334

Korea Development Bank, 334

科特利科夫,拉里380,381

Kotlikoff, Larry, 380, 381

Kroll债券评级,385

Kroll Bond Ratings, 385

克鲁格曼保罗,287,347-48,353,372,393,402

Krugman, Paul, 287, 347–48, 353, 372, 393, 402

KSF银行,351

KSF Bank, 351

库姆莱本,尼克,333 n

Kumleben, Nick, 333n

科威特投资局,309 n

Kuwait Investment Authority, 309n

京都,189年

Kyoto, 189

劳动

labour

在亚洲,263-64

in Asia, 263–64

被迫19,22

forced, 19, 22

流动性,14,251,264

mobility, 14, 251, 264

金钱如链条,1

money as chains of, 1

有组织的(参见 工会

organized (see trade unions)

农村,264

rural, 264

作为价值单位,19

as unit of value, 19

非熟练工人和半熟练工人,14

unskilled and semi-skilled, 14

劳动力市场,371,394

labour markets, 371, 394

工党,231

Labour party, 231

劳动生产率,367-68

labour productivity, 367–68

拉克尔,杰弗里339,340

Lacker, Jeffrey, 339, 340

拉克伊,法官,167 n

Lackey, Judge, 167n

拉马克式演化,323

Lamarckian evolution, 323

拉蒙特,诺曼,291

Lamont, Norman, 291

房东负面看法,211,227,231

landlords, negative views of, 211, 227, 231

房东游戏,211-12

Landlord’s Game, 211–12

拉斯韦尔,哈罗德·D.,190

Lasswell, Harold D., 190

拉美

Latin America

援助,282

aid to, 282

英国投资额,269

British investment in, 269

债务危机和货币贬值82,91,180 n ,264,282

debt crises and currency depreciations, 82, 91, 180n, 264, 282

安然公司和,157

Enron and, 157

养老金,201

pensions, 201

贫困率,201

poverty rates, 201

另见 南美洲

See also South America

拉丁裔借款人,244

Latino borrowers, 244

法律

law

金融35,313

finance and, 35, 313

参见 法规/监管机构

See regulation/regulators

劳,杰拉德36-38,38

Law, Gerard, 36–38, 38

约翰·劳,117-18,128-45,156-58,258

Law, John, 117–18, 128–45, 156–58, 258

专制主义,129-31,138-39

absolutism, 129–31, 138–39

以及银行(参见 银行

and banks (see banks)

以及纸币,128-29、131、138、156

and paper money, 128–29, 131, 138, 156

以及养老金,135

and pensions, 135

安妮法典,175

Law of Ann, 175

莱伊,肯尼斯,156-60

Lay, Kenneth, 156–60

利森,尼克,264

Leeson, Nick, 264

左翼,83,186工党社会主义者

Left wing, 83, 186. See also Labour party; socialists

雷曼兄弟

Lehman Brothers

以及2007-08年金融危机的原因,351

and causes of financial crisis of 2007–08, 351

以及政治反弹,390

and political backlash, 390

以及2007-08年金融危机演变,327、333-46、362、408

and progression of financial crisis of 2007–08, 327, 333–46, 362, 408

以及近期的金融创新,401

and recent financial innovations, 401

以及对2007-08年金融危机的应对措施380,383-84

and responses to financial crisis of 2007–08, 380, 383–84

莱利斯塔德,125

Lelystad, 125

勒梅尔,艾萨克122,123

le Maire, Isaac, 122, 123

贷款。参见: 银行债务贷款放贷人

lending. See banks; debt/debts; loans; moneylenders

列宁,第六卷,第226页

Lenin, V. I., 226

据称对货币贬值有深刻见解,99

alleged insight on currency devaluation, 99

论帝国主义的竞争与战争,279

on imperialist rivalries and war, 279

还有金钱,17

and money, 17

欠发达国家,14,260 新兴 市场/发展中国家

less-developed countries, 14, 260. See also emerging markets/developing countries

金融危机的杠杆损失观点,353,365

leveraged-losses view of financial crisis, 353, 365

利用,5,148,210,240-41n308

leveraging, 5, 148, 210, 240–41n, 308

刘易斯·肯尼斯·D . 2,328

Lewis Kenneth D., 2, 328

商事法, 171

lex mercatoria, 171

责任

liability

有限责任公司(参见 有限责任公司

limited (See limited-liability companies)

无限,171

unlimited, 171

自由帝国主义,270

liberal imperialism, 270

自由化

liberalization

资本市场,285

capital market, 285

经济,305

economic, 305

贸易280,283

trade, 280, 283

自由党,186

Liberal party, 186

自由派,84

liberals, 84

自由意志主义401,402

libertarians, 401, 402

Libor 243,297 n ,343

Libor, 243, 297n, 343

利比亚,390

Libya, 390

力帆公司,305

Lifan company, 305

69-70岁人群的年金

life annuities, 69–70

预期寿命,173、175-76、182、192、202-3

life expectancy, 173, 175–76, 182, 192, 202–3

李国强,362

Li Kwqiang, 362

利马,254

Lima, 254

有限责任公司112、120、160、172

limited-liability companies, 112, 120, 160, 172

林肯,亚伯拉罕,86 -87年

Lincoln, Abraham, 86–87

林肯储蓄贷款公司,236 n

Lincoln Savings and Loan, 236n

流动性,7,47,51n326n329

liquidity, 7, 47, 51n, 326n, 329

以及银行监管,381

and banking regulation, 381

以及2007-08年金融危机的原因,354

and causes of financial crisis of 2007–08, 354

危机,51,51 n ,275-77,319 金融危机

crises, 51, 51n, 275–77, 319 (see also financial crises)

以及加密货币,404

and cryptocurrencies, 404

以及第一次世界大战,273、274、275、279

and First World War, 273, 274, 275, 279

比率,57

ratios, 57

以及2007-08年金融危机的补救措施,358

and remedies for financial crisis of 2007–08, 358

刘晓波,362

Liu Xiaobo, 362

利物浦,88

Liverpool, 88

利物浦勋爵(首相),77

Liverpool, Lord (Prime Minister), 77

劳合·乔治,大卫,186

Lloyd George, David, 186

劳埃德(伦敦)171-72,186

Lloyd’s (London), 171–72, 186

劳埃德银行,52,180

Lloyds Bank, 52, 180

罗,安德鲁,319-20

Lo, Andrew, 319–20

罗德里戈·德·洛艾萨,22

Loaisa, Rodrigo de, 22

贷款

loans

条件,170

conditional, 170

强制,66-68

forced, 66–68

流动性为47

liquidity of, 47

另见 债务/债务

See also debt/debts

高利贷者,13-14、36-38、59、257、322-23

loan sharks, 13–14, 36–38, 59, 257, 322–23

伦敦

London

城市,50,92,143,171

City of, 50, 92, 143, 171

作为金融中心,274

as financial centre, 274

保险市场,171-72

insurance market, 171–72

预期寿命,173

life expectancy in, 173

美第奇银行,40,44

Medici bank in, 40, 44

伦敦保险公司,182

London Assurance Corporation, 182

伦敦德里,托马斯·皮特伯爵,137,142

Londonderry, Thomas Pitt, Earl of, 137, 142

伦敦银行间同业拆借利率(Libor)243,297 n ,343

London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (Libor), 243, 297n, 343

伦敦政治经济学院,365

London School of Economics, 365

伦敦威斯敏斯特银行,52

London & Westminster Bank, 52

多头头寸,290-91

long positions, 290–91

长期资本管理公司,335

Long-Term Capital Management, 335

长期资本管理公司(LTCM 296-301,304

Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), 296–301, 304

洛伦兹,爱德华,346

Lorenz, Edward, 346

洛杉矶,241

Los Angeles, 241

洛特,特伦特,166

Lott, Trent, 166

彩票贷款70,118

lottery loans, 70, 118

路易斯安那130,133-34,136-37,164

Louisiana, 130, 133–34, 136–37, 164

路易十四,国王,128,137

Louis XIV, King, 128, 137

路易十五,国王,129,143

Louis XV, King, 129, 143

路易十六,国王,143年

Louis XVI, King, 143

楼继伟, 310 n

Lou Jiwei, 310n

洛文菲尔德,亨利,268-69

Lowenfeld, Henry, 268–69

LTCM。参见 长期资本管理公司。

LTCM. See Long Term Capital Management

罗平,363

Luo Ping, 363

莱福德礁,7

Lyford Cay, 7

M0(货币基础或高能货币),47

M0 (monetary base or high-powered money), 47

M1(狭义货币供应量),47

M1 (narrow money), 47

M2、28、47

M2, 28, 47

M3,47

M3, 47

马,杰克,407

Ma, Jack, 407

马基雅维利,尼科洛,39

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 39

麦克,约翰,2

Mack, John, 2

科林·麦克劳林, 175 , 177 , 182

Maclaurin, Colin, 175, 177, 182

麦克米伦,哈罗德,231

Macmillan, Harold, 231

宏观经济学,318,328

macroeconomics, 318, 328

黑手党,234

Mafia, 234

马哈拉施特拉邦,159

Maharashtra, 159

Main (Chas. T.), Inc., 284

Main (Chas. T.), Inc., 284

缅因州,53

Maine, 53

马六甲(Melaka),125

Malacca (Melaka), 125

马来西亚287,289

Malaysia, 287, 289

马尔代夫,28

Maldives, 28

渎职。参见 欺诈和不当行为

malfeasance. See fraud and misconduct

马尔萨斯,托马斯,176年注,314

Malthus, Thomas, 176n, 314

管理实践,革命,148

management practices, revolution in, 148

曼科·卡帕克,20-21

Manco Capac, 20–21

马内斯,阿尔弗雷德,178

Manes, Alfred, 178

制造业。参见 工业/工业化

manufacturing. See industry/industrialization

毛派,253

Maoists, 253

海上保险,171-72、186、274

marine insurance, 171–72, 186, 274

Markowitz, Harry M., 296 –97

Markowitz, Harry M., 296–97

按市值计价会计,159

mark-to-market accounting, 159

马歇尔,阿尔弗雷德,57

Marshall, Alfred, 57n

马歇尔,乔治将军,280 n

Marshall, General George, 280n

马歇尔k比率,57 n

Marshallian k ratio, 57n

马歇尔计划,280-81

Marshall Plan, 280–81

马丁,小威廉·麦克切斯尼,154

Martin, William McChesney Jr, 154

马克思,格劳乔,148

Marx, Groucho, 148

马克思,卡尔/马克思主义17,195

Marx, Karl/Marxism, 17, 195

马里波恩济贫 183-84、185、188

Marylebone Workhouse, 183–84, 185, 188

玛丽·波平7,336

Mary Poppins, 7, 336

马萨诸塞州经济适用房联盟,244

Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, 244

马西斯,昆汀,41岁

Massys, Quentin, 41

马苏利帕特南,121

Masulipatnam, 121

数学

mathematics

应用于金融保险领域,4,29-32,173-75,293

applied to finance and insurance, 4, 29–32, 173–75, 293

中文,30

Chinese, 30

历史,29-32

history of, 29–32

东方4,31

Oriental, 4, 31

马瑟森,詹姆斯,266

Matheson, James, 266

麦克伯尼,埃德,234

McBirney, Ed, 234

麦凯恩,约翰,237 n

McCain, John, 237n

麦克伦南,马特,333 n

McLennan, Matt, 333n

医疗保险和医疗补助194,201-3

Medicare and Medicaid, 194, 201–3

美第奇,科西莫,40,44

Medici, Cosimo, 40, 44

科西莫公爵美第奇, 39 , 43 –44

Medici, Duke Cosimo de’, 39, 43–44

乔瓦尼·迪·比奇·德·美第奇,39 –40, 41 –42

Medici, Giovanni di Bicci de’, 39–40, 41–42

美第奇家族,洛伦佐·美第奇,43

Medici, Lorenzo the Magnificent, 43

美第奇家族, 4 , 39 –44, 59 , 67

Medici family, 4, 39–44, 59, 67

多样化,42-44,44-45

diversification of, 42–44, 44–45

第二册书, 40 , 40 –41, 40 n

libro segreto, 40, 40–41, 40n

地中海,24

Mediterranean, 24

孟菲斯,55-56,246,248,250

Memphis, 55–56, 246, 248, 250

雇佣兵,66

mercenaries, 66

商业银行,50,274

merchant banks, 50, 274

《威尼斯商人》。 参见 莎士比亚,威廉

Merchant of Venice. See Shakespeare, William

并购,323,327-28

mergers and acquisitions, 323, 327–28

梅里韦瑟,约翰295,298-99,300,301

Meriwether, John, 295, 298–99, 300, 301

默克尔,安格拉,373-75

Merkel, Angela, 373–75

美林证券2,235,249,296,309,327-28,329,335

Merrill Lynch, 2, 235, 249, 296, 309, 327–28, 329, 335

默顿,罗伯特294、295、296、298

Merton, Robert, 294, 295, 296, 298

达米亚/巴比伦尼亚,26-29,170,313,331

Mesopotamia/Babylonia, 26–29, 170, 313, 331

金属,与金钱联系,1,22-26,28,45,48,51-52,54,57

metals, link with money, 1, 22–26, 28, 45, 48, 51–52, 54, 57

墨西哥,24,91,201,253,278,283

Mexico, 24, 91, 201, 253, 278, 283

迈阿密,241

Miami, 241

米歇莱,朱尔斯,84岁

Michelet, Jules, 84

微型企业,256

micro-businesses, 256

小额信贷,13,255-57

microfinance, 13, 255–57

中东125,276,282

Middle East, 125, 276, 282

主权财富基金9,309

sovereign wealth funds, 9, 309

战争爆发6,282

war in, 6, 282

迁移263,278

migration, 263, 278

米兰,66

Milan, 66

米勒,克里斯,333 n

Miller, Chris, 333n

百万富翁,135

millionaires, 135

明斯基,海曼151,153

Minsky, Hyman, 151, 153

MIRAS。参见 “源头抵押利息减免” 。

MIRAS. See Mortgate Interest Relief At Source

不当行为。参见 欺诈和不当行为。

misconduct. See fraud and misconduct

米什金,弗雷德里克,314

Mishkin, Frederic, 314

密西西比州,84、85-86、89 气泡;卡特里娜飓风

Mississippi, 84, 85–86, 89. See also bubbles; Katrina (Hurricane)

密西西比公司(前身为印度公司,Compagnie des Indes130-45、155、158、160

Mississippi Company (former Company of the Indies, Compagnie des Indes), 130–45, 155, 158, 160

移动在线支付平台,406

mobile online payment platforms, 406

穆罕默德,马哈蒂尔·本,289

Mohamad, Mahathir bin, 289

莫伊弗,亚伯拉罕·德,173-74

Moivre, Abraham de, 173–74

摩鹿加群岛,121

Moluccas, 121

君主。参见 王室资金。

monarchs. See royal funding

美国货币史(弗里德曼和施瓦茨著),第355页

Monetary History of the United States (Friedman and Schwartz), 355

货币政策

monetary policy

以及资产价格下跌,151,154-55

and decline in asset prices, 151, 154–55

以及国内目标,281-82

and domestic objectives, 281–82

以及抵押贷款危机,244,310

and mortgage crisis, 244, 310

转变,108

transformation of, 108

货币理论,94

monetary theory, 94

货币联盟,370

monetary unions, 370

money

商品化的劳动力,17

commoditized labour, 17

标准23、25、28-29

criteria for, 23, 25, 28–29

进步的驱动力,313-14

driving force behind progress, 313–14

作为神,79

as god, 79

市场,50

market, 50

对……的偏见,3

prejudices against, 3

债务人与债权人之间的关系,313

relationship between debtor and creditor, 313

作为信仰和信任的体现,28-29

as representation of belief and trust, 28–29

代币为,26

tokens as, 26

银行所承担的特定负债总额为48

as total of specific liabilities incurred by banks, 48

另见: 硬币/铸币电子货币纸币

See also coins/coinage; electronic money; paper money

放债人

moneylenders

对……敌意3,32-38,59

hostility to, 3, 32–38, 59

非法(参见 高利贷

illegal (see loan sharks)

易受默认设置影响,35、38、45

vulnerability to defaults, 35, 38, 45

货币社会,17-19,59

moneyless societies, 17–19, 59

货币供应量

money supply

定义,47

definitions, 47

递增25、28、132

increasing, 25, 28, 132

以及战争,93,95

and war, 93, 95

“单一业务”金融服务,324

‘mono-line’ financial services, 324

垄断,125、127、130、282

monopolies, 125, 127, 130, 282

大富翁(游戏),211-13

Monopoly (game), 211–13

蒙塔古,玛丽·沃特利夫人,135

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 135

蒙蒂,马里奥,375

Monti, Mario, 375

穆迪,385

Moody’s, 385

穆迪,246

Moody’s, 246

摩尔,黛博拉,180 n

Moore, Deborah, 180n

道德风险,234

moral hazard, 234

摩根士丹利,2,309,310n327,335,337,366

Morgan Stanley, 2, 309, 310n, 327, 335, 337, 366

摩洛哥,272

Morocco, 272

死亡率,392

mortality rates, 392

死亡率统计数据,173另见 预期寿命。

mortality statistics, 173. See also life expectancy

抵押贷款支持证券(MBS),386

mortgage-baked securities (MBS), 386

抵押贷款利息源头减免 (MIRAS),231

Mortgage Interest Relief At Source (MIRAS), 231

抵押贷款,347-48

mortgage lending, 347–48

抵押贷款,8-11,213,216,221-22,226-29,237-39,254,324-25

mortgages, 8–11, 213, 216, 221–22, 226–29, 237–39, 254, 324–25

可调速率ARM),242,248,352

adjustable-rate (ARMs), 242, 248, 352

歧视,230

discrimination in, 230

以及经济衰退8-9,222

and economic downturns, 8–9, 222

联邦政府和,226-27、238-39、242、250-51

federal government and, 226–27, 238–39, 242, 250–51

固定利率住宅242,297

fixed-rate residential, 242, 297

赎,222,247-48

foreclosures, 222, 247–48

在大萧条/新政时期,第226页第241-242

in Great Depression/New Deal, 226, 241–42

历史,8-9,221-22,227-28,237-39

history, 8–9, 221–22, 227–28, 237–39

负债57 n ,213,229

indebtedness, 57n, 213, 229

“无处申索”,248 n

‘no recourse,’ 248n

证券化(参见 证券化

securitization (see securitization)

次级贷款(参见 次级贷款

subprime (see subprime lending)

以及美国经济的胜利,4

and US economic triumph, 4

莫瑟,帕特里夏,334

Mosser, Patricia, 334

摩城唱片229,242

Motown, 229, 242

莫齐洛,安杰洛·R.,2

Mozilo, Angelo R., 2

戈克斯山,404

Mt. Gox, 404

穆林斯,大卫,295-96

Mullins, David, 295–96

穆尔瓦尼,米克,394

Mulvaney, Mick, 394

突变(经济学),321-23,322

mutations (in economics), 321–23, 322

互助协会,第226、233另见 房屋互助协会储蓄贷款协会(“储蓄银行”)。

mutual associations, 226, 233. See also building societies; Savings & Loan (S&L) associations (‘thrifts’)

内罗毕,257

Nairobi, 257

中本聪(化名),401

Nakamoto, Satoshi (pseudonym), 401

《南京条约》,267 -68年

Nanking, Treaty of, 267–68

那不勒斯,80

Naples, 80

拿破仑·波拿巴4,72-73,75-79

Napoleon Bonaparte, 4, 72–73, 75–79

拿破仑战争,74-79、85、172、215、277

Napoleonic Wars, 74–79, 85, 172, 215, 277

《国家银行法》第53条

National Bank Act, 53

国债75、92、109

national debts, 75, 92, 109

国家经济委员会,391

National Economic Council, 391

英国国家医疗服务体系。参见 英国福利国家

National Health Service. See Britain, welfare state

民族主义,362

nationalism, 362

国有化。参见 银行

nationalization. See banks

国家省银行,52

National Provincial Bank, 52

国家安全战略,397

National Security Strategy, 397

全国房价指数,239-40

Nationwide house price index, 239–40

自然选择和市场选择,322-23,330

natural and market selection, 322–23, 330

自然资源。参见 资源

natural resources. See resources

纳粹75,80

Nazis, 75, 80

尼尔,拉里,315 n

Neal, Larry, 315n

尼尔林,斯科特,211-212

Nearing, Scott, 211–212

负资产,248

negative equity, 248

新帝国主义,285

neo-imperialism, 285

荷兰

Netherlands, The

财务和商业成功,4,45,69-71,126

financial and commercial success, 4, 45, 69–71, 126

荷兰(省),69-70

Holland (province), 69–70

养老基金,204

pension fund, 204

房地产价格泡沫,214

property price bubble, 214

另见 联合省

See also United Provinces

网络外部性,125-26

network externalities, 125–26

新政226、238、348

New Deal, 226, 238, 348

新奥尔良,89、134、163-165、201、210、242。另卡特里娜飓风

New Orleans, 89, 134, 163–65, 201, 210, 242. See also Katrina (Hurricane)

纽约,94,153,171

New York, 94, 153, 171n

纽约证券交易所,275

New York Stock Exchange, 275

《纽约时报》, 380

New York Times, 380

纽约大学,360-61

New York University, 360–61

尼加拉瓜,272

Nicaragua, 272

尼古拉二世,沙皇,公元99

Nicholas II, tsar, 99n

尼日利亚25,106,270

Nigeria, 25, 106, 270

9/11袭击,6,156,162,205-6

9/11 attack, 6, 156, 162, 205–6

忍者(无收入、无工作、无资产),247

NINJA (No Income No Job or Assets), 247

尼克松,理查德54,282

Nixon, Richard, 54, 282

北方岩石,8,250,324

Northern Rock, 8, 250, 324

朝鲜,18

North Korea, 18

西北欧,378

Northwestern Europe, 378

挪威,268

Norway, 268

房地产价格,214

property prices, 214

以及次级贷款8,247

and subprime loans, 8, 247

核攻击,205

nuclear attacks, 205

努卡克-马科人,18-19

Nukak-Makoe people, 18–19

数字系统,30-31

number systems, 30–31

奥巴马巴拉克,330,344,358-59,363,382,383

Obama, Barack, 330, 344, 358–59, 363, 382, 383

经合组织。参见 经济合作与发展组织。

OECD. See Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

外实体5、9-10、249-50、327

off-balance-sheet entities, 5, 9–10, 249–50, 327

信用评级办公室,385

Office of Credit Rating, 385

联邦住房企业监管办公室,239,250-51

Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, 239, 250–51

离岸市场,282

offshore markets, 282

石油,25,282,291,304

oil, 25, 282, 291, 304

奥尼尔,吉姆,260-61

O’Neill, Jim, 260–61

洋葱 343

Onion, The, 343

公开市场操作,149-51,154 n

Open Market Operations, 149–51, 154n

扭转行动,356

Operation Twist, 356

鸦片,265-68

opium, 265–68

期权/期权合约,第138、208、294-97、313看涨期权;看跌期权

options/option contracts, 138, 208, 294–97, 313. See also call options; put options

期权定价。参见 布莱克-斯科尔斯模型(黑框)。

options pricing. See Black-Scholes model (black box)

经济合作与发展组织214、285、374

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 214, 285, 374

东方影响,4,31

Oriental influences, 4, 31

奥尔良公爵(摄政王),129131134141年

Orleans, Duke of (Regent), 129, 131, 134, 141

场外交易合约。参见 衍生品。

OTC contracts. See derivatives

奥斯曼帝国,278年

Ottoman Empire, 278

崩溃,278

collapse, 278

犹太人,34-35

Jews in, 34–35

威尼斯34-35,68

and Venice, 34–35, 68

另见 土耳其

See also Turkey

直接货币交易(OMT),377

outright monetary transactions (OMT), 377

局外人,148

outsiders, 148

奥弗伦德·格尼河岸,51-52

Overend Gurney bank, 51–52

奥弗斯通男爵,52岁

Overstone, Baron, 52

场外交易合约。参见 衍生品。

‘over-the-counter’ contracts. See derivatives

过度交易,113

overtrading, 113

太平洋投资管理公司。参见 PIMCO

Pacific Investment Management Company. See PIMCO

太平洋岛屿,125

Pacific islands, 125

帕多瓦,66

Padua, 66

Palmer, J. Horsley, 50 –51

Palmer, J. Horsley, 50–51

帕默斯顿子爵266,266-67

Palmerston, Viscount, 266, 266–67

巴拿马,284

Panama, 284

恐慌,336

panics, 336

教皇制度,40,66

Papacy, 40, 66

纸张市场,商业,250

paper markets, commercial, 250

纸币,26-28、50、52、262-63、274

paper money, 26–28, 50, 52, 262–63, 274

英格兰银行垄断46,50

Bank of England monopoly, 46, 50

以及第一次世界大战,276

and First World War, 276

以及恶性通货膨胀,99

and hyperinflation, 99

另见 约翰·劳

See also Law, John

巴黎,71

Paris, 71

共识,285

Consensus, 285

昆坎普瓦街, 136 , 142 –43

rue Quincampoix, 136, 142–43

帕克兄弟,212

Parker Brothers, 212

议会70-71,215

parliaments, 70–71, 215

合作关系,42,112

partnerships, 42, 112

帕斯卡,布莱斯,172

Pascal, Blaise, 172

被动型基金,400

passive funds, 400

帕特森,琳恩,256

Patterson, Lynne, 256

尔森汉克334,335,343,353

Paulson, Hank, 334, 335, 343, 353

保尔森,亨利·M.,小('汉克' 15,26-27

Paulson, Henry M., Jr (‘Hank’), 15, 26–27

保尔森,约翰,302-3,347

Paulson, John, 302–3, 347

当铺,55

pawnshops, 55

支付架构,406-7

payment architectures, 406–7

pecunia, 24

pecunia, 24

皮尔,罗伯特爵士,51岁

Peel, Sir Robert, 51

贵族,215另见 贵族制。

peerage, 215. See also aristocracy

挂钩汇率。参见 货币美元

pegs. See currency; dollar

佩勒姆,亨利爵士,71岁

Pelham, Sir Henry, 71

半岛战争,76

Peninsular War, 76

养老基金,309,313

pension funds, 309, 313

作为投资者,108、114、180、200、302

as investors, 108, 114, 180, 200, 302

养老金(老年)

pensions (old age)

人口老龄108,201-4

ageing populations, 108, 201–4

智利,197-201

Chile, 197–201

历史,135,184-86,201-4

history, 135, 184–86, 201–4

日本191-93,204

Japan, 191–93, 204

房产购买和,210

property purchase and, 210

另见 债券和债券市场养老基金

See also bonds and bond markets; pension funds

彭索·德拉·维加,约瑟夫,126

Penso de la Vega, Joseph, 126

中国人民银行360,361

People’s Bank of China, 360, 361

人民日报, 363

People’s Daily, 363

中华人民共和国,396 -400年

People’s Republic of China, 396–400

胡椒24,125

pepper, 24, 125

珀金斯,约翰,284,288

Perkins, John, 284, 288

庇隆,胡安·多明戈将军,101 –3

Perón, General Juan Domingo, 101–3

波斯25,29

Persia, 25, 29

秘鲁,19-20,91,116,157,201,251-54

Peru, 19–20, 91, 116, 157, 201, 251–54

佩鲁齐家族,39

Peruzzi family, 39

石油美元,282

petrodollars, 282

费城,178

Philadelphia, 178

菲律宾252,253

Philippines, 252, 253

菲利普斯,伊丽莎白(“莉齐”),211

Phillips, Elizabeth (‘Lizzie’), 211

菲利普斯曲线,395

Phillips curve, 395

菲尼克斯,241

Phoenix, 241

皮卡尔,伯纳德143,144

Picart, Bernard, 143, 144

八块钱,25

pieces of eight, 25

PIMCO(太平洋投资管理公司)64,100

PIMCO (Pacific Investment Management Company), 64, 100

皮涅拉,何塞197,201

Piñera, José, 197, 201

平加拉,31 n

Pingala, 31n

奥古斯托·皮诺切特,196 –97 年、199 –200 年

Pinochet, Augusto, 196–97, 199–200

比萨,30-31,40,65,66

Pisa, 30–31, 40, 65, 66

庇护二世,教宗,43

Pius II, Pope, 43

弗朗西斯科·皮萨罗,19 – 21, 23

Pizarro, Francisco, 19–21, 23

瘟疫168,169

plagues, 168, 169

Planet Finance,第388、389

Planet Finance, 388, 389

波兰,99

Poland, 99

政治改革。参见 选举改革。

political reform. See electoral reform

政治家12,204,329

politicians, 12, 204, 329

教皇,亚历山大,144 -45年

Pope, Alexander, 144–45

波普尔,卡尔,290

Popper, Karl, 290

人口问题,第176页。另见 养老基金

population issues, 176n. See also pension funds

民粹主义391-92,393,396

populism, 391–92, 393, 396

托马索·波尔蒂纳里,44岁

Portinari, Tommaso, 44

葡萄牙,76

Portugal, 76

以及2007-08年金融危机的影响,345

and effects of financial crisis of 2007–08, 345

以及欧洲债务危机,370、376、377、378、380

and the European debt crisis, 370, 376, 377, 378, 380

探险与东印度群岛贸易118-19、121、125

exploration and East Indies trade, 118–19, 121, 125

犹太人,34

and Jews, 34

波斯纳,理查德,348

Posner, Richard, 348

“后美国”时代4,264

‘post-American’ era, 4, 264

危机后,368

post-crisis, 368

波托西, 21 , 22 , 24 , 26 , 48 , 59

Potosí, 21, 22, 24, 26, 48, 59

英镑,51,292-93金本位制

pound sterling, 51, 292–93. See also gold standard

贫困和贫穷国家

poverty and poor countries

原因3,13-14,59

causes of, 3, 13–14, 59

以及国际投资263-64、269-70、282

and international investment, 263–64, 269–70, 282

缺乏金融机构信贷,13-14,59,257

lack of financial institutions and credit, 13–14, 59, 257

高利贷者和13-14,36-38

loan sharks and, 13–14, 36–38

以及小额信贷,257-58

and microfinance, 257–58

以及财产所有权,245-46,251-55

and property ownership, 245–46, 251–55

被占用的房地产,251-52

real estate occupied by, 251–52

另见: 援助新兴市场/发展中国家济贫院

See also aid; emerging markets/developing countries; workhouses

前现代社会,169

pre-modern societies, 169

普列奥布拉任斯基,叶夫根尼,99

Preobrazhensky, Yevgeni, 99

普雷斯坦泽和普雷斯蒂蒂, 66 –68

prestanze and prestiti, 66–68

价格管制,310

price controls, 310

市盈率115,148

price-earnings ratios, 115, 148

价格革命” ,25,59

‘price revolution,’ 25, 59

价格上涨25、93、215、261、282、310

price rises, 25, 93, 215, 261, 282, 310

一级经销商信贷机制334,337

Primary Dealer Credit Facility, 334, 337

查尔斯王子 O.,2

Prince Charles O., 2

普林西普,加夫里洛274,275

Princip, Gavrilo, 274, 275

私募股权合伙企业/公司,5、9、308、309、324

private equity partnerships/firms, 5, 9, 308, 309, 324

私有化108、157、196、324​​

privatization, 108, 157, 196, 324

概率,172 –74,182,316 –19

probability, 172–74, 182, 316–19

宝洁公司,148

Proctor & Gamble, 148

生产力,193-94

productivity, 193–94

期票,26,46 纸币

promissory notes, 26, 46. See also paper money

Pro Mujer,255 –57

Pro Mujer, 255–57

“工作量证明”算法,404

‘proof-of-work’ algorithms, 404

财产所有制民主213-14,221-30,244,251,253,313

property-owning democracies, 213–14, 221–30, 244, 251, 253, 313

房产/房地产

property/real estate

所有权的获取211 n ,230,232,245-46,252-54,313

access to ownership, 211n, 230, 232, 245–46, 252–54, 313

与股票市场相比,239 –40

compared with stock market, 239–40

开发者,255,305

developers, 255, 305

英语世界……热情4,6,211-14,241

English-speaking world’s passion for, 4, 6, 211–14, 241

确定所有权/产权,252-54,254-55

establishing ownership/title, 252–54, 254–55

房屋所有权

home ownership

英国,211 n ,221,230–32

Britain, 211n, 221, 230–32

美国, 221 –32, 229 –30, 244 , 248 –49

USA, 221–32, 229–30, 244, 248–49

房地产泡沫349,353

housing bubbles, 349, 353

流动性不足251,329

illiquidity, 251, 329

投资114、216、236-48、250-51、258

investment in, 114, 216, 236–48, 250–51, 258

法律251-55,270

law, 251–55, 270

以及政治权力215、230、253、258

and political power, 215, 230, 253, 258

价格指数,239-40

price indexes, 239–40

价格上涨和下跌,9,213-14,232,241-42,247-48,251,258

price rises and downturns, 9, 213–14, 232, 241–42, 247–48, 251, 258

价格的区域差异,214 n

regional variations in prices, 214n

不安全投资赌注210、216、251、255、258

unsafe investment bet, 210, 216, 251, 255, 258

保护主义,147、278、393另见自由贸易

protectionism, 147, 278, 393. See also free trade

普鲁士政府债券81,83-84

Prussian government bonds, 81, 83–84

公共债务,388

public debt, 388

公共住房,226-27,231

public housing, 226–27, 231

上市公司,325家

publicly owned firms, 325

公私合营投资基金,358

Public- Private Investment Fund, 358

公共工程管理局,226

Public Works Administration, 226

普克勒-穆斯考王子,84岁

Pückler-Muskau, Prince, 84

普京,弗拉基米尔253,390

Putin, Vladimir, 253, 390

看跌期权,12、155、208

put options, 12, 155, 208

合格抵押贷款,386

qualified mortgage loans, 386

量化宽松(QE)

quantitative easing (QE)

以及欧洲金融危机374、375、377

and the European financial crisis, 374, 375, 377

以及2007-08年金融危机的补救措施356、357-58、360

and remedies for financial crisis of 2007–08, 356, 357–58, 360

以及对2007-08年金融危机的应对措施341,342

and responses to financial crisis of 2007–08, 341, 342

以及2007-08年金融危机的理论意义,365

and theoretical implications of financial crisis of 2007–08, 365

量化宽松政策2(QE2),356

quantitative easing 2 (QE2), 356

量化宽松政策3 (QE3 356,363-64

quantitative easing 3 (QE3), 356, 363–64

“量化” ,294-300

‘quants,’ 294–300

量子基金,292

Quantum Fund, 292

Quilmes ,251-52,253-54

Quilmes, 251–52, 253–54

种族分裂,第223-227页第229-223页,第231页第244-246页。另见 反犹主义少数族裔

race divisions, 223–27, 229–30, 231, 244–46. See also anti-Semitism; ethnic minorities

拉赫曼,彼得,231

Rachman, Peter, 231

铁路207,268

railways, 207, 268

兰德公司,297

Rand Corporation, 297

随机漂移,322

random drift, 322

随机性,314

randomness, 314

“随机游走”,294

‘random walk,’ 294

拉涅利,刘易斯,238

Ranieri, Lewis, 238

评级机构,246

rating agencies, 246

原材料。参见 资源

raw materials. See resources

RCA,148

RCA, 148

里根,罗纳德231,233

Reagan, Ronald, 231, 233

以及资本账户自由化,285

and capital account liberalization, 285

以及储蓄贷款机构,233

and S&Ls, 233

福利改革,201

welfare reforms, 201

房地产。查看 房产/房地产

real estate. See property/real estate

房地产泡沫,349

real estate bubbles, 349

经济衰退96,151

recessions, 96, 151

前景,8,308-10

prospects of, 8, 308–10

追索权,248 n,276

recourse, 248n, 276

复苏,经济251,282

recovery, economic, 251, 282

红线歧视(信用评级229,230

red-lining (credit rating), 229, 230

重新崛起的市场,265

re-emerging markets, 265

里斯-莫格勋爵,153

Rees-Mogg, Lord, 153

再通,132

reflation, 132

反身性,290,293

reflexivity, 290, 293

改革法案。参见 选举改革

Reform Bills. See electoral reform

Q条例,第228、233

Regulation Q, 228, 233

法规/监管机构,50-51,228,233-36,237,328-30,380-87,400

regulation/regulators, 50–51, 228, 233–36, 237, 328–30, 380–87, 400

以及变化,326-27

and change, 326–27

放松管制157,158

deregulation, 157, 158

Z条例,386

Regulation Z, 386

监管环境,380-89

regulatory environment, 380–89

莱因哈特,卡门,368

Reinhart, Carmen, 368

宗教少数群体,3

religious minorities, 3

汇款,345

remittances, 345

文艺复兴4,408

Renaissance, 4, 408

文艺复兴(公司),302-3

Renaissance (company), 302–3

伦达,马里奥,234

Renda, Mario, 234

人民币305,310

renminbi, 305, 310

出租房

rented accommodation

私人,214,222,231,254

private, 214, 222, 231, 254

公共住房(参见: 公屋房东的负面看法公共住房

public (See council housing; landlords, negative views of; public housing)

租客/食利者, 69 –70, 71 , 92 –93, 98 –99, 107 , 130

rentes/rentiers, 69–70, 71, 92–93, 98–99, 107, 130

赔偿。参见 德国

reparations. See Germany

报道、压力、325

reporting, pressures of, 325

代议制政府,25

representative governments, 25

镇压(政治),196

repression (political), 196

美国共和党157、359、387、393、398、399

Republican Party (US), 157, 359, 387, 393, 398, 399

格鲁吉亚共和国,405

Republic of Georgia, 405

预备小学,343

Reserve Primary, 343

准备金率,45-46

reserve ratio, 45–46

住宅抵押贷款支持证券(RMBS CDO),249

residential mortgage-backed collateralized debt obligations (RMBS CDOs), 249

住宅抵押贷款支持证券(RMBS)239 n ,246,249

residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS), 239n, 246, 249

清算信托公司,237

Resolution Trust Corporation, 237

资源

resources

分配,313 –14

allocation, 313–14

竞争310 –11,322

competition for, 310–11, 322

作为“诅咒”,25

as ‘curses,’ 25

另请参阅 商品市场和价格

See also commodity markets and prices

退休年龄,202另见 养老基金养老金(老年)

retirement ages, 202. See also pension funds; pensions (old age)

露华浓,148

Revlon, 148

革命者,1

revolutionaries, 1

Rich ,Frank,390-91

Rich, Frank, 390–91

黎塞留,枢机主教,83岁

Richelieu, Cardinal, 83

右翼

Right wing

以及债券市场,83

and bond markets, 83

以及福利国家,195 -96年

and welfare state, 195–96

风险

risk

厌恶与寻求,317

aversion and seeking, 317

可计算性,314,316-17

calculability of, 314, 316–17

在国家担保的鼓励下,329

encouraged by state guarantees, 329

管理,163,313-14

management of, 163, 313–14

最优分布,7,327

optimal distribution, 7, 327

福利国家,以及184、192、194

welfare state and, 184, 192, 194

另见 波动性

See also volatility

风险管理解决方案,168

Risk Management Solutions, 168

里维拉,迭戈,222-25

Rivera, Diego, 222–25

RMBS。参见 住宅抵押贷款支持证券(RMBS)。

RMBS. See residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS)

罗伯斯庇尔,马克西米连,83岁

Robespierre, Maximilien, 83

洛克菲勒,约翰·D.,小,226

Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 226

洛克菲勒中心,226

Rockefeller Center, 226

罗德里加,丹尼尔,35岁

Rodriga, Daniel, 35

罗杰斯,吉姆,265

Rogers, Jim, 265

罗戈夫,肯尼斯287,333 n ,368

Rogoff, Kenneth, 287, 333n, 368

罗马尼亚34,94

Romania, 34, 94

罗曼诺夫帝国。参见 俄罗斯/苏联

Romanov empire. See Russia/USSR

罗马

Rome

古代,23-24,30-31

ancient, 23–24, 30–31

美第奇银行,40,42

Medici bank in, 40, 42

罗斯福,富兰克林· D . ,147,150,226

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 147, 150, 226

罗萨里奥,105

Rosario, 105

罗森格伦,埃里克·S .337-38,339

Rosengren, Eric S., 337–38, 339

罗斯托,沃尔特,281-82

Rostow, Walt, 281–82

罗斯柴尔德,第一代男爵(内森),106

Rothschild, 1st Baron (Nathan), 106

罗斯柴尔德,第三代男爵,59岁

Rothschild, 3rd Baron, 59

罗斯柴尔德,第四代男爵,73岁

Rothschild, 4th Baron, 73

罗斯尔德,阿姆谢尔,77,82-83

Rothschild, Amschel, 77, 82–83

罗斯柴尔德,卡尔,77岁

Rothschild, Carl, 77

罗斯柴尔德,詹姆斯,77,87

Rothschild, James, 77, 87

罗斯柴尔德,莱昂内尔·德,87

Rothschild, Lionel de, 87

罗斯柴尔德,梅耶·阿姆谢尔82,83

Rothschild, Mayer Amschel, 82, 83

罗斯柴尔德,内森·梅耶4,73

Rothschild, Nathan Mayer, 4, 73

所罗门·罗斯柴尔德,77

Rothschild, Salomon, 77

罗斯柴尔德,所罗门·德,87

Rothschild, Salomon de, 87

罗斯柴尔德,伊夫林·德爵士,73岁

Rothschild, Sir Evelyn de, 73

罗斯尔德家族和公司73-79、82、83-85、93、268

Rothschild family and firm, 73–79, 82, 83–85, 93, 268

以及美国内战,第85、86-87、89-90

and American Civil War, 85, 86–87, 89–90

阿根廷105-6,268

and Argentina, 105–6, 268

犹太77,81 n ,82-83,84

Jewishness, 77, 81n, 82–83, 84

关于80的神话

myths about, 80

政治权力,77,81 n ,83-85

political power, 77, 81n, 83–85

以及美国,85

and US, 85

鲁比尼,努里尔,360-61

Roubini, Nouriel, 360–61

皇家交易所,275

Royal Exchange, 275

皇家资助,48-49,69-70,69-71,128-29,141-43

royal funding, 48–49, 69–70, 69–71, 128–29, 141–43

皇家学会,173

Royal Society, 173

鲁比奥,马可,398

Rubio, Marco, 398

鲁夫,雅克,282

Rueff, Jacques, 282

拉姆斯菲尔德,唐纳德,162

Rumsfeld, Donald, 162

俄罗斯/苏联

Russia/USSR

布尔什维克政权,99,278

Bolshevik regime, 99, 278

债券,81、84、272、277-78、298-99

bonds, 81, 84, 272, 277–78, 298–99

共产主义阵营的末日将至,282-83

Communist bloc’s impending doom, 282–83

货币可兑换性,276

currency convertibility, 276

债务违约(1998107、154、299、301

debt default (1998), 107, 154, 299, 301

以及第一次世界大战及其后果,94、99、274、277-78、301

and First World War and aftermath, 94, 99, 274, 277–78, 301

犹太人,80

Jews in, 80

石油是“资源诅咒”,25

oil as ‘resource curse,’ 25

房地产价格飙升,214

property price boom, 214

俄罗斯/罗曼诺夫帝国273,278

Russian/Romanov Empire, 273, 278

未受大萧条影响,146

unaffected by Great Depression, 146

另见 金砖国家

See also BRICs

Ryan, Anthony W., 15 , 319

Ryan, Anthony W., 15, 319

圣西蒙公爵,130 -31年

Saint-Simon, Duke of, 130–31

所罗门史密斯巴尼(前身为所罗门兄弟公司238-39,295-96,298

Salomon Smith Barney (formerly Salomon Brothers), 238–39, 295–96, 298

制裁,407

sanctions, 407

桑德斯,伯尼391,396

Sanders, Bernie, 391, 396

圣地亚哥,241

San Diego, 241

旧金山162,183

San Francisco, 162, 183

梵语数学,31 n

Sanskrit mathematics, 31n

圣地亚哥(智利),200 –201, 278

Santiago (Chile), 200–201, 278

圣托马斯,星期日,22

Santo Tomás, Domingo de, 22

萨塞蒂,弗朗切斯科,44岁

Sassetti, Francesco, 44

托马斯·R·萨文,203

Saving, Thomas R., 203

节省

savings

因税收而气馁,194

discouraged by taxes, 194

应对未来可能出现的意外情况,210

against future surprises, 210

蛋白269,308

gluts, 269, 308

国际比较,306-8

international comparisons, 306–8

银行的需求,52,59

need for banks, 52, 59

前现代社会,169

pre-modern societies, 169

房产购买,210

property purchase as, 210

另请参阅 储蓄银行

See also savings banks

储蓄银行,52、93、273

savings banks, 52, 93, 273

以及债券93,270

and bonds, 93, 270

英国52,270

British, 52, 270

储蓄过剩,349

savings gluts, 349

储蓄贷款协会储蓄机构” 226-28、228、230、232-39、295、321、324、328-29

Savings & Loan (S&L) associations (‘thrifts’), 226–28, 228, 230, 232–39, 295, 321, 324, 328–29

监管环境,233-36,234-35,328-29

regulatory environment of, 233–36, 234–35, 328–29

萨沃纳罗拉,吉罗拉莫,44

Savonarola, Girolamo, 44

萨伏依,维克托·阿梅迪奥二世公爵,128年

Savoy, Victor Amadeus II, Duke of, 128

斯堪的纳维亚,338

Scandinavia, 338

沃尔夫冈·朔伊布勒, 373 , 374

Schäuble, Wolfgang, 373, 374

施梅尔辛,保罗,333 n

Schmelzing, Paul, 333n

斯科尔斯,迈伦294-98,301

Scholes, Myron, 294–98, 301

舒默,查克,398

Schumer, Chuck, 398

熊彼特,约瑟夫320,330

Schumpeter, Joseph, 320, 330

施瓦茨,安娜,149,151

Schwartz, Anna, 149, 151

科学,314另见 技术创新

science, 314. See also technological innovation

范围问题,318,322

scope issues, 318, 322

苏格兰,128、170、175-78格拉斯哥

Scotland, 128, 170, 175–78. See also Glasgow

斯科特,沃尔特爵士 178-180,179

Scott, Sir Walter, 178–80, 179

苏格兰大臣遗孀基金178,179

Scottish Ministers’ Widows Fund, 178, 179

苏格兰寡妇,180,182-83

Scottish Widows, 180, 182–83

斯克鲁格斯,理查德·F.('迪基'),166-167,167页脚注182

Scruggs, Richard F. (‘Dickie’), 166–67, 167n, 182

海平面,205

sea levels, 205

长期停滞366,367

secular stagnation, 366, 367

赛科利达, 170

securitas, 170

证券

securities

类型70,324

new types, 70, 324

另见 资产支持证券资产证券化

See also asset-backed securities; assets; securitization

证券法,第288

Securities Act, 288n

美国证券交易委员会(SEC),290 n384-85,405

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 290n, 384–85, 405

证券市场项目,373

Securities Markets Program, 373

证券化,5,60,238-39,313

securitization, 5, 60, 238–39, 313

以及2007 - 08年金融危机的原因,351-52

and causes of financial crisis of 2007–08, 351–52

债务10,159

of debt, 10, 159

联邦政府和238,250-51

federal government and, 238, 250–51

危险239,247

perils of, 239, 247

私人债券保险公司和,239

private bond insurers and, 239

种族隔离,229

segregation, 229

自拍,Beanie,246

Self, Beanie, 246

参议院银行委员会,343

Senate Banking Committee, 343

塞内加尔公司,131

Senegal Company, 131

9·11恐怖袭击,345

September 11 terrorist attacks, 345

Serageldin,Kareem,382 n

Serageldin, Kareem, 382n

塞尔维亚1,274

Serbia, 1, 274

性语言,323

sexual language, 323

影子银行。参见 银行

shadow banking. See banks

莎士比亚,威廉,《威尼斯商人 32-33、32-36、59、85、170

Shakespeare, William, The Merchant of Venice, 32–33, 32–36, 59, 85, 170

上海,278

Shanghai, 278

棚户区,251-52

shanty towns, 251–52

股份(或股票、股权)

shares (or stocks or equities)

作为抵押品,123

as collateral, 123

位移,133 –34

displacement, 133–34

特征112-17,120

features of, 112–17, 120

以及第一次世界大战,277

and First World War, 277

法律体系,132-34

Law’s System and, 132–34

股东大会,112

shareholders’ meetings, 112

另见 期权/期权合约股票市场和交易所

See also options/option contracts; stock markets and exchanges

夏普,威廉,297

Sharpe, William, 297

肖-斯图尔特,帕特里克,277

Shaw-Stewart, Patrick, 277

贝壳,28

shells, 28

谢特尔斯顿,36-38

Shettleston, 36–38

席勒,罗伯特,258

Shiller, Robert, 258

光辉道路,253

Shining Path, 253

船舶/航运,119,125-26 海上保险

ships/shipping, 119, 125–26. See also marine insurance

空头头寸,290

short positions, 290

卖空,127

short selling, 127

夏洛克,32-36、37、38、84、170

Shylock, 32–36, 37, 38, 84, 170

锡耶纳,65

Siena, 65

硅谷。参见 .com狂热。

Silicon Valley. See dot.com mania

银,19-25,26,101,131

silver, 19–25, 26, 101, 131

以及密西西比泡沫138 –39,141

and Mississippi Bubble, 138–39, 141

西班牙语和,1,19-25,48

Spanish and, 1, 19–25, 48

西蒙斯,詹姆斯,302-3

Simons, James, 302–3

新加坡,309 n

Singapore, 309n

结构化投资工具(SIV)。参见结构化投资工具。

SIVs. See structured investment vehicles

斯基林,杰弗里·K. ,157-60

Skilling, Jeffrey K., 157–60

奴隶制

slavery

以及房屋所有权,245

and home ownership, 245

罗斯柴尔德家族和,87

Rothschilds and, 87

奴隶贸易,24

slave trading, 24

斯隆,阿尔弗雷德,148

Sloan, Alfred, 148

斯洛文尼亚,1

Slovenia, 1

储蓄贷款协会。参见 储蓄贷款协会(“储蓄机构”)。

S&Ls. See Savings & Loan (S&L) associations (‘thrifts’)

史密斯,亚当50,257

Smith, Adam, 50, 257

社会主义者

socialists

以及债券市场,83-84

and bond markets, 83–84

以及自由化,285

and liberalization, 285

以及福利国家184-86,196

and welfare state, 184–86, 196

社会主义标准报,17-18

Socialist Standard, 17–18

环球银行金融电信协会(SWIFT 401,407

Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), 401, 407

偿付能力II标准,386

Solvency II standards, 386

宋红兵,80岁

Song Hongbing, 80

乔治·索罗斯, 2 , 289 , 289 –93, 296 , 298 , 300 , 302 –3, 309

Soros, George, 2, 289, 289–93, 296, 298, 300, 302–3, 309

收入,2,302-3

income, 2, 302–3

关于“市场原教旨主义”,第309页

on ‘market fundamentalism,’ 309

苏鲁耶,胡安,104

Sourrouille, Juan, 104

南美洲,19-25,255-57

South America, 19–25, 255–57

以及金融技术的演进,400

and evolution of financial technologies, 400

天然气管道,111

gas pipelines, 111

物权法,252

property law, 252

另见 拉丁美洲

See also Latin America

南罗得西亚,270

Southern Rhodesia, 270

韩国214,287,366

South Korea, 214, 287, 366

南海泡沫,402另见 泡沫。

South Sea Bubble, 402. See also bubbles

主权财富基金9,309,324

sovereign wealth funds, 9, 309, 324

苏联式经济学,195

Soviet-style economics, 195

苏联。参见 俄罗斯/苏联

Soviet Union. See Russia/USSR

标普。参见 标准普尔。

S&P. See Standard and Poor’s

西班牙34,118-19,268

Spain, 34, 118–19, 268

以及银行监管,382 n

and banking regulation, 382n

衰落的帝国25,48-49,69-70,118-119,125​​

declining empire, 25, 48–49, 69–70, 118–19, 125

以及2007-08年金融危机的影响,345

and effects of financial crisis of 2007–08, 345

以及欧洲债务危机,370、376、377、378、380

and the European debt crisis, 370, 376, 377, 378, 380

以及黄金和白银1,19-23,24-26,48

and gold and silver, 1, 19–23, 24–26, 48

房地产价格飙升,214

property price boom, 214

皇家资助,48-49,69-70

royal funding, 48–49, 69–70

西班牙王位继承战争,143年

Spanish Succession, War of the, 143

特殊目的实体(SPE),159

special-purpose entities (SPEs), 159

物种形成,49,322-25

speciation, 49, 322–25

投机者,114、123、208期货合约

speculators, 114, 123, 208. See also futures contracts

斯宾塞,赫伯特,322

Spencer, Herbert, 322

香料,118-19,121-22,126

spices, 118–19, 121–22, 126

价差221-22,299

spreads, 221–22, 299

非法占地者,254

squatters, 254

松鼠皮,24

squirrel skins, 24

斯里兰卡,125

Sri Lanka, 125

《稳定与增长公约》第370、371

Stability and Growth Pact, 370, 371

滞胀,194

stagflation, 194

停滞367,368,393

stagnation, 367, 368, 393

标准普尔(S&P),246

Standard and Poor’s (S&P), 246

标准普尔500指数115 n ,239-40,260,303-4,354

Standard and Poor’s 500, 115n, 239–40, 260, 303–4, 354

标准普尔,385

Standard & Poor’s, 385

斯坦福,294

Stanford, 294

斯塔克,尤尔根,373

Stark, Jürgen, 373

州立农场保险公司,166-67

State Farm insurance company, 166–67

国有企业。参见 私有化主权财富基金

state-owned enterprises. See privatization; sovereign wealth funds

州立储蓄贷款公司,234

State Savings and Loan, 234

统计数据,173

statistics, 173

施泰因布吕克,皮尔,366

Steinbrück, Peer, 366

英镑。参见 英镑。

sterling. See pound sterling

斯特恩,加里,338

Stern, Gary, 338

史蒂文森,乔治,56岁

Stevenson, George, 56

斯图尔特,吉米227,228

Stewart, Jimmy, 227, 228

斯蒂格利茨,约瑟夫,285-87

Stiglitz, Joseph, 285–87

股票经纪人,142

stockbrokers, 142

斯德哥尔摩,45-46

Stockholm, 45–46

股票市场和交易所

stock markets and exchanges

313的好处

benefits of, 313

气泡113-15,143

bubbles, 113–15, 143

智利,200

Chile, 200

关闭275,277

closure of, 275, 277

与债券市场相比,115-16

compared with bond markets, 115–16

与房地产市场相比23-242,242

compared with property market, 23–242, 242

崩溃次数113-14、146-51、160、301、338、347、354-55、388、389、400

crashes, 113–14, 146–51, 160, 301, 338, 347, 354–55, 388, 389, 400

作为对公司的纪律,112

as discipline on companies, 112

以及第一次世界大战272,274-75

and First World War, 272, 274–75

外国证券交易所,269

foreign stock exchanges, 269

远期/期货市场,123

forward/futures markets, 123

欺诈,114

fraud, 114

历史,4,7,69,113-15,122-23,304,313

history of, 4, 7, 69, 113–15, 122–23, 304, 313

指数,152

indices, 152

通货膨胀,114

and inflation, 114

保险公司和,181-82

insurance companies and, 181–82

国际比较,116

international comparisons, 116

机械销售,152

mechanical selling, 152

以及养老金(参见 养老基金

and pensions (see pension funds)

投机者,114

speculators, 114

证券交易所,5,69,122-23,274-75,276-77

stock exchanges, 5, 69, 122–23, 274–75, 276–77

以及信贷供应,123

and supply of credit, 123

世界总市值,4

total capitalization of the world’s, 4

波动性和风险7、14、111-12、116-17、126、147、154、160、295、297-301、316

volatility and risks, 7, 14, 111–12, 116–17, 126, 147, 154, 160, 295, 297–301, 316

战争116,126,156

war and, 116, 126, 156

股票。参见 股份(或股票、股权)。

stocks. See shares (or stocks or equities)

斯托克顿,大卫·J.,337

Stockton, David J., 337

斯托楼,216-20,217

Stowe House, 216–20, 217

斯特朗,本杰明,149

Strong, Benjamin, 149

“结构调整”,283

‘structural adjustment,’ 283

结构化投资工具SIV),5、9、250、326

structured investment vehicles (SIVs), 5, 9, 250, 326

斯泰尔,88

Styal, 88

次级贷款,8-9,242-51,260,308

subprime lending, 8–9, 242–51, 260, 308

黑人和拉丁裔借款人,244

and black and Latino borrowers, 244

负责244-46、250-51、308页​

responsibility for, 244–46, 250–51, 308

次级抵押贷款,350

subprime mortgages, 350

糖,262

sugar, 262

萨默斯,拉里366-67,368

Summers, Larry, 366–67, 368

阳光地带,234

Sunbelt, 234

太阳保险公司办公室,172

Sun Insurance Office, 172

瑞典国家银行,360

Sveriges Riksbank, 360

交换5,208-9,297,297n,385-86​

swaps, 5, 208–9, 297, 297n, 385–86

瑞典,45-46,116,192,340

Sweden, 45–46, 116, 192, 340

瑞士国家银行53,360

Swiss National Bank, 53, 360

瑞士53,116,134

Switzerland, 53, 116, 134

以及欧洲债务危机371,378

and the European debt crisis, 371, 378

以及后危机时代的全球经济,366

and post-crisis global economy, 366

剑刃公司,145

Sword Blade Company, 145

叙利亚1,390

Syria, 1, 390

系统重要性金融机构(SIFI),383-84

Systemically Important Financial Institution (SIFI), 383–84

泰比,马特,347

Taibbi, Matt, 347

尾部风险,209,316

tail risk, 209, 316

台湾311,344

Taiwan, 311, 344

坦桑尼亚,253

Tanzania, 253

关税

tariffs

保护主义者,278

protectionist, 278

上升,264

rising, 264

税收,393

taxation, 393

税收

taxes

债券市场和,64,92

bond markets and, 64, 92

英国193-94,215

British, 193–94, 215

收藏集,71、132、136

collection, 71, 132, 136

在债务国中,283

in debtor countries, 283

消费税,68

excise, 68

佛罗伦萨人,42,66,68

Florentine, 42, 66, 68

土地,211

land, 211

以及抵押贷款支付,231

and mortgage payments, 231

以及财产法改革,253

and property law reform, 253

储蓄受到抑制,192-94

savings discouraged by, 192–94

泰勒,吉恩,166

Taylor, Gene, 166

Taylor, John, 333 n, 341 , 352

Taylor, John, 333n, 341, 352

卡车司机工会,234

Teamsters Union, 234

技术创新

technological innovation

进化,321-22

evolutionary, 321–22

历史,8,148,261-63

history of, 8, 148, 261–63

通货膨胀,108

and inflation, 108

可转移性,263

transferability, 263

武器262,273

weaponry, 262, 273

科技公司,115家

technology companies, 115

淡马锡,309 n

Temasek, 309n

租户。参见 房东对出租房屋的负面看法出租房屋

tenants. See landlords, negative views of; rented accommodation

腾讯,406

Tencent, 406

田纳西州,55-56

Tennessee, 55–56

定期资产支持证券贷款机制(TALF),356

Term Asset-backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF), 356

“定期拍卖机制” 9

‘term auction facilities,’ 9

恐怖主义/恐怖袭击,162、205、253

terrorism/terrorist attacks, 162, 205, 253

财务后果,275

financial consequences, 275

对冲,210

hedging against, 210

纽约和伦敦,6

New York and London, 6

核或生物,205

nuclear or biological, 205

德克萨斯州,157另见 达拉斯

Texas, 157. See also Dallas

纺织工业,126,263

textile industry, 126, 263

泰国287,344

Thailand, 287, 344

泰恩,约翰,2

Thain, John, 2

撒切尔,玛格丽特231,245,285

Thatcher, Margaret, 231, 245, 285

第三方验证,401

third-party verification, 401

第三世界

Third World

贷款和援助,281,283

loans and aid to, 281, 283

另见 新兴市场/发展中国家

See also emerging markets/developing countries

“储蓄机构”。参见 储蓄贷款协会(“储蓄机构”)。

‘thrifts.’ See Savings & Loan (S&L) associations (‘thrifts’)

西藏,311

Tibet, 311

烟草131、136、166

tobacco, 131, 136, 166

代币,48

token coins, 48

托勒,詹姆斯234-35,237

Toler, James, 234–35, 237

tontines, 71

tontines, 71

“大到不能倒”的银行329、383、384

‘too big to fail’ banks, 329, 383, 384

托尔西侯爵,128

Torcy, Marquis of, 128

Torrijos, Omar, 284 , 285

Torrijos, Omar, 284, 285

游客,货币管制,280

tourists, currency controls on, 280

法布里斯·图雷, 347 , 351 –52

Tourre, Fabrice, 347, 351–52

贸易保护主义,392

trade protectionism, 392

工会

trade unions

阿根廷103,108

Argentina, 103, 108

权力兴衰,108,147,193

growth and decline of power, 108, 147, 193

以及生产力,193-94

and productivity, 193–94

贸易战,399

trade wars, 399

分期偿还债务,5

‘tranched’ debts, 5

跨大西洋银行业务,50

transatlantic banking, 50

国债,395

Treasury bonds, 395

财政部长383,391

Treasury Secretary, 383, 391

条约港口,267-68,271

treaty ports, 267–68, 271

特里谢,让-克洛德,373

Trichet, Jean-Claude, 373

“三难困境” ,281-82

‘trilemma,’ 281–82

AAA级投资级证券246,249

triple-A rated investment grade securities, 246, 249

特罗洛普,安东尼,216

Trollope, Anthony, 216

问题资产救助计划(TARP 341、343、351、353、356、358

Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), 341, 343, 351, 353, 356, 358

特朗普唐纳德· J . ,391-94,396,397-99,407-8

Trump, Donald J., 391–94, 396, 397–99, 407–8

信任、金钱和,28

trust, money and, 28

受托储蓄银行,270

Trustee Savings Banks, 270

《贷款真实披露法》第386条

Truth in Lending Act, 386

崔本,103-4

Ts’ui Pên, 103–4

盖伊·塔格韦尔,212

Tugwell, Guy, 212

郁金香泡沫126 –27,402

tulip bubble, 126–27, 402

突尼斯1,390

Tunisia, 1, 390

土耳其,395

Turkey, 395

土耳其/土耳其人35、68、94、268 奥斯曼帝国​

Turkey/Turks, 35, 68, 94, 268. See also Ottoman Empire

特沃斯基,阿莫斯,316-17

Tversky, Amos, 316–17

瑞银集团(银行),296、309、350-51

UBS (bank), 296, 309, 350–51

乌克兰,390

Ukraine, 390

不确定性,168,314-16确定性风险

uncertainty, 168, 314–16. See also certainty; risk

承销商,171

underwriters, 171

失业率,247

unemployment, 247

以及信用额度,38

and credit, 38

以及2007-08年金融危机的影响,345

and effects of financial crisis of 2007–08, 345

在大萧条时期147,222

in Great Depression, 147, 222

以及恶性通货膨胀,97-98

and hyperinflation, 97–98

凯恩斯,98

Keynes on, 98

以及金融危机期间的美国经济,354

and US economy during financial crisis, 354

阿拉伯联合酋长国,309 n

United Arab Emirates, 309n

英国

United Kingdom

以及2007-08年金融危机的影响,345

and effects of financial crisis of 2007–08, 345

以及欧洲债务危机,371

and the European debt crisis, 371

以及2007-08年金融危机的补救措施,359

and remedies for financial crisis of 2007–08, 359

另见 英国

See also Britain

联合国,394

United Nations, 394

荷兰联合东印度公司。参见 VOC(荷兰/联合东印度公司)。

United Netherlands East India Company. See VOC (Dutch/United East India Company)

联合省

United Provinces

债券市场,70

bond market, 70

货币入,45

currencies in, 45

以及东印度公司(参见 VOC(荷兰/联合东印度公司))

and East India Company (see VOC (Dutch/United East India Company))

的幂,70

power of, 70

70年代食利者

rentiers in, 70

省际竞争,120

rivalry between provinces, 120

另见 荷兰

See also Netherlands, The

美国

United States of America

人口老龄化,201 -3年

ageing population, 201–3

《美国帝国》,第283-284

‘American empire,’ 283–84

银行系统,53-54

banking system, 53–54

英国投资额,269

British investment in, 269

预算赤字,109

budget deficit, 109

以及2007 - 08年金融危机的原因,350-51

and causes of financial crisis of 2007–08, 350–51

货币政策,310

currency policy, 310

债务与破产,55-57

debt and bankruptcy in, 55–57

国防工业,291

defence industry, 291

抑郁症(参见 抑郁症

depression (see depressions)

社会分裂(参见 种族分裂

divisions in society (see race divisions)

以及2007-08年金融危机的影响,345

and effects of financial crisis of 2007–08, 345

以及欧洲债务危机,371

and the European debt crisis, 371

以及货币演变,406,407-8

and evolution of money, 406, 407–8

以及第一次世界大战,94,186

and First World War, 94, 186

法国和(参见 路易斯安那州

France and (See Louisiana)

政府债券,297

government bonds, 297

医疗保健保险,57,193-94,201-3

health care and insurance, 57, 193–94, 201–3

房屋所有权(参见 房产/房地产

home ownership (see property/real estate)

以及国际货币基金组织和世界银行,283-89

and IMF and World Bank, 283–89

移民和人口,263-64

immigration and population, 263–64

进口,307

imports, 307

收入,1-2,57,261-62,306-8

incomes, 1–2, 57, 261–62, 306–8

工业化,261-62

industrialization, 261–62

通货膨胀,100,193-94

inflation, 100, 193–94

保险,183

insurance, 183

国际借款,306-8

international borrowing, 306–8

以及移动在线支付平台,406

and mobile online payment platforms, 406

海外援助和投资,280-82

overseas aid and investment, 280–82

房地产(参见 property/房地产

real estate (see property/real estate)

经济衰退前景,8,308-10

recession prospects, 8, 308–10

以及对2007-08年金融危机的应对措施,344

and responses to financial crisis of 2007–08, 344

储蓄,306 –8

savings, 306–8

第二次世界大战,189

and Second World War, 189

社会分化(参见 种族分化

social divisions (see race divisions)

股票市场,6,116,152-55,241-42,260

stock market, 6, 116, 152–55, 241–42, 260

作为次贷超级大国,259

as subprime superpower, 259

利用经济杀手,284-85

use of economic hit men, 284–85

福利制度,194,201-3

welfare system, 194, 201–3

大学178,302

universities, 178, 302

乌里布鲁,何塞·F.,102

Uriburu, José F., 102

乌鲁克,29

Uruk, 29

美国陆军工程兵团,168

US Army Corps of Engineers, 168

美国银行体系,350

US banking system, 350

美国国会

US Congress

以及欧洲债务危机,372

and the European debt crisis, 372

以及雷曼兄弟破产案,336

and Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, 336

以及2007-08年金融危机的补救措施,359

and remedies for financial crisis of 2007–08, 359

以及对2007-08年金融危机的应对措施342,343

and responses to financial crisis of 2007–08, 342, 343

美国众议院,359

US House of Representatives, 359

苏联。参见 俄罗斯/苏联

USSR. See Russia/USSR

美国钢铁公司,320-21

US Steel, 320–21

美国财政部

US Treasury

以及2007-08年金融危机的原因,353

and causes of financial crisis of 2007–08, 353

以及2007-08年的金融危机,333

and the financial crisis of 2007–08, 333

以及2007 - 08年金融危机的补救措施,358,360

and remedies for financial crisis of 2007–08, 358, 360

以及2007-08年金融危机的理论意义,366

and theoretical implications of financial crisis of 2007–08, 366

以及美中贸易关系,363-64

and US-China trade relations, 363–64

高利贷,33-34、40、50、66

usury, 33–34, 40, 50, 66

效用与概率,174

utility and probability, 174

公用事业公司,157另见 能源行业

utility companies, 157. See also energy industry

乌托邦主义,17,211

utopianism, 17, 211

北方邦,257

Uttar Pradesh, 257

瓦拉察斯,迪米特里斯,333 n

Valatsas, Dimitris, 333n

风险价值 ( VaR )模型,298、301、326 n

Value at Risk (VaR) models, 298, 301, 326n

瓦鲁法基斯,亚尼斯,379

Varoufakis, Yanis, 379

梵蒂冈,40

Vatican, 40

凡勃伦,索尔斯坦,320

Veblen, Thorstein, 320

维拉斯科,卡门,256

Velasco, Carmen, 256

委内瑞拉25,92,116

Venezuela, 25, 92, 116

威尼斯,32-36,55,68-69,117,127-28

Venice, 32–36, 55, 68–69, 117, 127–28

以及债券,68-69,85

and bonds, 68–69, 85

贫民窟,33-34

ghetto, 33–34

美第奇家族39-40,43

Medici in, 39–40, 43

以及放贷,32-36

and money-lending, 32–36

以及东方影响,31

and Oriental influences, 31

圣莫伊塞,117

San Moise, 117

Vernon S&L,234

Vernon S&L, 234

《凡尔赛条约》95

Versailles Treaty, 95

维克斯堡,85-86,88

Vicksburg, 85–86, 88

维多利亚女王,218年

Victoria, Queen, 218

维也纳94,275

Vienna, 94, 275

越南战争,282 n

Vietnam War, 282n

暴力,在缺乏金钱的情况下,18

violence, in absence of money, 18

“虚拟”货币。参见 电子货币

‘virtual’ money. See electronic money

VOC (荷兰/联合东印度公司),119-27、141、160-61

VOC (Dutch/United East India Company), 119–27, 141, 160–61

持有股份120、121、122-27、126-27

shares in, 120, 121, 122–27, 126–27

结构119-20,124

structure, 119–20, 124

挥发性

volatility

据称死亡人数为7人。

alleged death of, 7

另见 投资者股票市场和交易所

See also investors; stock markets and exchanges

沃尔克,保罗153,233,338

Volcker, Paul, 153, 233, 338

沃尔克规则382,394

Volcker Rule, 382, 394

伏尔泰134-35,138

Voltaire, 134–35, 138

投票权。参见 选举改革

voting rights. See electoral reform

减薪,147

wage cuts, 147

华莱士,罗伯特174-78,182

Wallace, Robert, 174–78, 182

华尔街股市崩盘,146比49

Wall Street crash, 146–49

《华尔街日报》, 第381页

Wall Street Journal, 381

《华尔街改革和消费者保护法》(多德-弗兰克法案),382-85

Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank), 382–85

战争

war

以及资本主义制度,272-73

and capitalist system, 272–73

导致“国家破产”,273

causing ‘bankruptcy of nations,’ 273

以及商品市场和价格,275,311

and commodity markets and prices, 275, 311

条件,279,311-12

conditions for, 279, 311–12

融资对象1、25、46、73、130、278​​

finance for, 1, 25, 46, 73, 130, 278

全球化和,311-12

globalization and, 311–12

以及工业变革,320

and industrial change, 320

以及通货膨胀(参见 通货膨胀

and inflation (see inflation)

以及保险(参见 保险

and insurance (see insurance)

还有金钱,1

and money, 1

概率分别168、273、279、315

probabilities, 168, 273, 279, 315

以及贸易,125

and trade, 125

战争债券,94 -95年

war bonds, 94–95

以及福利国家186-87,187-93

and welfare state, 186–87, 187–93

另请参阅 债券和债券市场

See also bonds and bond markets

战争损害公司,189

War Damage Corporation, 189

战争贷款,270,277

War Loans, 270, 277

反恐战争,345

war on terror, 345

沃什,凯文334,338

Warsh, Kevin, 334, 338

华盛顿特区,281

Washington, D.C., 281

华盛顿共识,283,285

Washington Consensus, 283, 285

华盛顿互惠银行244,335

Washington Mutual, 244, 335

滑铁卢战役,第4、75、78-79

Waterloo, Battle of, 4, 75, 78–79

沃特金斯,谢伦,158-59

Watkins, Sherron, 158–59

瓦特,梅尔,387

Watt, Mel, 387

富裕,24-25岁,215

wealthy, 24–25, 215

武器。参见 军火/国防工业技术创新战争

weapons. See arms/defence industry; technological innovation; war

天气

weather

衍生物,209

derivatives, 209

极端,6另见 灾难

extreme, 6 (see also disasters)

以及股票市场,147

and stock markets, 147

韦伯,阿克塞尔,373

Weber, Axel, 373

韦伯斯特,亚历山大175-78,182

Webster, Alexander, 175–78, 182

微信支付,406

WeChat Pay, 406

魏德曼,延373,377

Weidmann, Jens, 373, 377

魏玛共和国,375

Weimar Republic, 375

福利国家,183-94

welfare state, 183–94

反对,197

backlash against, 197

194年的拆除

dismantling of, 194

以及经济,192-94

and economy, 192–94

以及战争(参见 战争

and war (see war)

威灵顿公爵,75 -76年,78年

Wellington, Duke of, 75–76, 78

温家宝,363

Wen Jiabao, 363

西联汇款,291

Western Union, 291

威斯敏斯特公爵,215

Westminster, Duke of, 215

小麦价格。参见 谷物

wheat prices. See grain

寡妇和孤儿176-180,179

widows and orphans, 176–80, 179

威尔金森,吉姆,334

Wilkinson, Jim, 334

奥兰治的威廉,70

William of Orange, 70

威廉姆森,约翰,238 n

Williamson, John, 238n

威尔逊,哈罗德,215

Wilson, Harold, 215

葡萄酒市场6,304

wine market, 6, 304

温弗瑞,奥普拉,245

Winfrey, Oprah, 245

维塞尔班克。 参见 阿姆斯特丹外汇银行

Wisselbank. See Amsterdam Exchange Bank

《绿野仙踪》, 221

Wizard of Oz, The, 221

沃尔夫,马丁,380

Wolf, Martin, 380

沃尔夫,汤姆,347

Wolfe, Tom, 347

女性

women

歧视6,256

discrimination against, 6, 256

作为企业家,255 –57, 305

as entrepreneurs, 255–57, 305

工人。参见 劳动。

workers. See labour

济贫185,188

workhouses, 185, 188

世界银行(前身为国际复兴开发银行/国际开发协会),第265页脚注281页,第395页

World Bank (former International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/International Development Association), 265n, 281, 395

阿根廷104,252

and Argentina, 104, 252

成立于281年

founding of, 281

贷款及条件,283-85

loans and conditions, 283–85

作为美国代理人,283-85

as US agents, 283–85

世界贸易中心袭击事件6、156、162、205

World Trade Center attack, 6, 156, 162, 205

世界贸易组织(WTO),397

World Trade Organization (WTO), 397

第一次世界大战,186-87,271-79

World War, First, 186–87, 271–79

后续,93-100,172,277-79

aftermath, 93–100, 172, 277–79

作为对全球化的反弹,264

as backlash against globalization, 264

此前数十年,271-79

decades preceding, 271–79

以及金融市场,146,274-78

and financial markets, 146, 274–78

第二次世界大战212-13,280,348

World War, Second, 212–13, 280, 348

战后金融体系,280-82

post-war financial system, 280–82

以及社会保险,186

and social insurance, 186

美国援助之后,280-82

US aid after, 280–82

减记,326

write-downs, 326

写作,首次使用,26

writing, first use of, 26

吴亚军,305

Wu Yajun, 305

徐,肖恩,333 n

Xu, Sean, 333n

徐翔,399

Xu Xiang, 399

游艇3,304

yachts, 3, 304

亚诺玛米人,18

Yanomamo people, 18

亚努科维奇,维克托,390

Yanukovych, Viktor, 390

雅浦岛,28

Yap islands, 28

中川八弘,191 –92

Yatsuhiro, Nakagawa, 191–92

耶伦,珍妮特,356

Yellen, Janet, 356

也门,390

Yemen, 390

日元,63

yen, 63

尹明莎,305

Yin Mingsha, 305

赎罪日战争,291

Yom Kippur War, 291

尤德科夫斯基,埃利泽,319

Yudkowsky, Eliezer, 319

余额宝,407

Yu’e Bao, 407

尤努斯,穆罕默德,256-57

Yunus, Muhammad, 256–57

零利率政策ZIRP),356、358、367

zero interest rate policy (ZIRP), 356, 358, 367

津巴布韦,101

Zimbabwe, 101

Zito ,Salena,392-93

Zito, Salena, 392–93

Zoellick , Robert, 281 , 284–85

Zoellick, Robert, 281, 284–85

佐弗,乔什333 n

Zoffer, Josh, 333n

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* 值得注意的是,女性毕业生的比例从2.3%增至3.4%。男性毕业生人数仍然远超女性毕业生。

* Revealingly, the increase for female graduates was from 2.3 to 3.4 per cent. The masters of the universe still outnumber the mistresses.

401 (k)计划于1980年推出,是一种固定缴款退休计划。员工可以选择将部分工资或薪金存入401(k)账户,并可选择如何进行投资。除少数例外情况外,账户中的资金在提取前无需缴税。

* 401(k) plans were introduced in 1980 as a form of defined contribution retirement plan. Employees can elect to have a portion of their wages or salaries paid or ‘deferred’ into a 401(k) account. They are then offered choices as to how the money should be invested. With a few exceptions, no tax is paid on the money until it is withdrawn.

征服者们前来寻找黄金和白银。哥伦布 在伊斯帕尼奥拉岛(今多米尼加共和国)建立的第一个定居点拉伊莎贝拉,就是为了开采当地的金矿。他也认为自己发现了白银,但后来证实,白银的痕迹只存在于哥伦布及其船员从西班牙带来的矿石样本中。

* The conquistadors came looking for both gold and silver. Columbus’s first settlement, La Isabela in Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic), was established to exploit local deposits of gold. He also believed he had found silver, but the only traces have subsequently been shown to have been in the sample ores Columbus and his men had brought from Spain.

1474 年费尔南多和伊莎贝拉的婚姻到 18 世纪,我们今天所称的西班牙,严格来说是阿拉贡王国和卡斯蒂利亚王国两个王国的联合体。

* From the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1474 until the eighteenth century, the country we call Spain was technically the union of two kingdoms: Aragon and Castile.

* 斐波那契数列出现在《达芬奇密码》中,这可能是大多数人听说过它的原因。然而,该数列最早以“mātrāmeru” (韵律之山)之名出现在梵语学者宾伽罗的著作中。

* The Fibonacci sequence appears in The Da Vinci Code, which is probably why most people have heard of it. However, the sequence first appeared, under the name mātrāmeru (mountain of cadence), in the work of the Sanskrit scholar Pingala.

* 该术语用于记录收入和利润以及重要的特定协议或合同的账簿。美第奇家族保存的其他账簿是 libro di entrata e uscita(收入和支出账簿)和 libro dei debitori e creditori(债务人和债权人账簿)。

* The term was used for books which recorded income and profits as well as specific agreements or contracts of importance. The other books kept by the Medici were the libro di entrata e uscita (book of income and expenditures) and the libro dei debitori e creditori (book of debtors and creditors).

* 从技术上讲,垄断只适用于伦敦方圆 65 英里的范围内,而且与 18 世纪一样,私人银行并未被禁止发行纸币。

* Technically, the monopoly applied only within a 65-mile radius of London and, as in the eighteenth century, private banks were not prohibited from issuing notes.

流动性不足 是指公司无法出售足够的资产来偿还负债。公司拥有足够的资产,但由于潜在买家太少,这些资产无法出售。破产是指负债价值明显超过资产价值。两者之间的区别比人们通常认为的要复杂得多。陷入流动性危机的公司或许能够出售其资产,但价格可能低到几乎等同于破产。

* Illiquidity is when a firm cannot sell sufficient assets to meet its liabilities. It has the right amount of assets, but they are not marketable because there are too few potential buyers. Insolvency is when the value of the liabilities clearly exceeds the value of the assets. The distinction is harder to draw than is sometimes assumed. A firm in a liquidity crisis might be able to sell its assets, but only at prices so low as to imply insolvency.

* 同期,抵押贷款债务占个人可支配收入的比例从 54% 上升到 140%。

* In the same period mortgage debt has risen from 54 per cent of disposable personal income to 140 per cent.

* 经济学家将这一比率称为马歇尔k,以经济学家阿尔弗雷德·马歇尔的名字命名。严格来说,k是货币基础与名义GDP的比率。

* A ratio known to economists as Marshallian k after the economist Alfred Marshall. Strictly speaking, k is the ratio of the monetary base to nominal GDP.

* 这不应与到期收益率混淆,到期收益率考虑的是债券发行政府按面值赎回债券所需的时间。

* This should not be confused with the yield to maturity, which takes account of the amount of time before the bond is redeemed at par by the issuing government.

因此 ,新的标准化英国政府债券被命名为“永久债券”。

* Hence the name ‘consols’ for the new standardized British government bonds.

* 有一次,普鲁士财政部长克里斯蒂安·罗特试图在贷款合同签署后修改条款,内森勃然大怒:“我亲爱的朋友,我已经尽到了我对上帝、你们的国王和财政大臣罗特的义务,我的钱都已经送到你们柏林了……现在轮到你们履行你们的义务了,信守承诺,不要再搞什么新花样,一切都必须按照我们这些凡人之间的约定来执行,这正是我所期望的,正如你们从我交付的款项中看到的那样。那里的阴谋集团对罗斯柴尔德先生无能为力,他有钱、有实力、有权力,他们只有无能为力。普鲁士国王、我的哈登贝格亲王和罗特大臣应该感到非常高兴,并感谢罗斯柴尔德先生,是他给你们送来了这么多钱,提升了普鲁士的信用。”一个出生在法兰克福犹太区的犹太人能够用这样的措辞给普鲁士官员写信,这充分说明了内森·罗斯柴尔德和他的兄弟们所代表的社会革命。

* At one point, when the Director of the Prussian Treasury, Christian Rother, attempted to modify the terms after the loan contract had been signed, Nathan exploded: ‘Dearest friend, I have now done my duty by God, your king and the Finance Minister von Rother, my money has all gone to you in Berlin . . . now it is your turn and duty to yours, to keep your word and not to come up with new things, and everything must remain as it was agreed between men like us, and that is what I expected, as you can see from my deliveries of money. The cabal there can do nothing against N. M. Rothschild, he has the money, the strength and the power, the cabal has only impotence and the King of Prussia, my Prince Hardenberg and Minister Rother should be well pleased and thank Rothschild, who is sending you so much money [and] raising Prussia’s credit.’ That a Jew born in the Frankfurt ghetto could write in these terms to a Prussian official speaks volumes about the social revolution Nathan Rothschild and his brothers personified.

*这是J.A.霍布森, 《帝国主义研究》 (1902年) 的作者。尽管他至今仍被誉为最早一批批判帝国主义的自由主义者之一,但霍布森对金融业却抱有典型的反犹主义敌意:“通过处理大量股票和股份,通过发行公司,通过操纵价值波动,证券交易所的巨头们从中获利。这些庞大的企业——银行业、经纪业、票据贴现业、贷款发行业、公司推广业——构成了国际资本主义的核心。它们由最牢固的组织纽带连接在一起,始终保持着最密切、最快捷的联系,位于每个国家商业中心的核心地带,就欧洲而言,它们主要由一个独特的种族的人控制,这些人拥有数个世纪的金融经验,因此它们处于控制各国政策的独特地位。”

* This was J. A. Hobson, author of Imperialism: A Study (1902). Though still renowned as one of the earliest liberal critics of imperialism, Hobson articulated a classically anti-Semitic hostility towards finance: ‘In handling large masses of stocks and shares, in floating companies, in manipulating fluctuations of values, the magnates of the Bourse find their gain. These great businesses – banking, broking, bill discounting, loan floating, company promoting – form the central ganglion of international capitalism. United by the strongest bonds of organisation, always in closest and quickest touch with one another, situated in the very heart of the business capital of every State, controlled, so far as Europe is concerned, chiefly by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience, they are in a unique position to control the policy of nations.’

* 用经济学的语言来说,这些关系可以简化为MV = PQ,其中M是流通中的货币量,V是货币流通速度(交易频率),P是价格水平,Q是总交易的实际价值。

* In the language of economics the relationships can be simplified as MV = PQ where M is the quantity of money in circulation, V is the velocity of money (frequency of transactions), P is the price level and Q is the real value of total transactions.

* 谋杀而非安乐死是普列奥布拉任斯基的强项;在所有布尔什维克领导人中,他是直接参与处决尼古拉二世及其家人的罪魁祸首。

* Murder rather than euthanasia was Preobrazhensky’s forte; he was of all the Bolshevik leaders the one most directly implicated in the execution of Nicholas II and his family.

* 历史上记录到的最高通货膨胀率出现在 1946 年 7 月的匈牙利,当时物价上涨了 4.19 万亿亿%(419 后面跟着 16 个零)。

* The highest recorded inflation rate in history was in Hungary in July 1946, when prices increased by 4.19 quintillion per cent (419 followed by sixteen zeros).

* 截至撰写本文时(2008年3月),津巴布韦的一场葬礼花费10亿津巴布韦元。年通货膨胀率为100000%。

* At the time of writing (March 2008), a funeral in Zimbabwe costs 1 billion Zimbabwean dollars. The annual inflation rate is 100,000 per cent.

* 市盈率是指股票价格除以包含股息在内的收益的比率。美国市盈率的长期平均值(自 1871 年以来)为 15.5。其最高值出现在 1999 年,为 32.6。目前为 18.6(数据来自全球金融数据公司,基于标准普尔 500 指数的历史数据)。

* A ratio of stock prices divided by earnings including dividends. The long-run average (since 1871) of the price–earnings ratio in the United States is 15.5. Its maximum was reached in 1999: 32.6. It currently stands at 18.6 (figures for the Standard and Poor’s 500 index, as extended back in time by Global Financial Data).

* 1580 年至 1640 年间,西班牙和葡萄牙的王位合并。

* Between 1580 and 1640 the crowns of Spain and Portugal were united.

* 从技术上讲,消除未来股息的不确定性,使这些股票具有了优先股甚至债券的性质。

* Technically, the removal of uncertainty about future dividends gave the shares the character of preference shares or even bonds.

* 衡量阿姆斯特丹银行成功与否的一个指标是,消费者价格通胀率从1550年至1608年间的每年2%下降到1609年至1658年间的每年0.9%,再到1659年至1779年间的每年0.1%。因此,VOC股票价格近八倍的涨幅与现代股票市场经通胀调整后的表现相比,相当不错。

* A measure of the success of the Bank of Amsterdam was that consumer price inflation fell from 2 per cent per annum between 1550 and 1608 to 0.9 per cent p.a. between 1609 and 1658 and just 0.1 per cent p.a. between 1659 and 1779. The nearly eight-fold appreciation in the VOC stock price therefore compares reasonably well with the inflation-adjusted performance of modern stock markets.

* 在阿卡迪亚纳的圣查尔斯、圣詹姆斯和圣约翰浸信会教区,仍然可以找到幸存者的踪迹。

* Traces of the survivors can still be found in the Acadiana parishes of St Charles, St James and St John the Baptist.

《泡沫 经济法》规定,未经法定授权而设立新公司属于违法行为,并禁止现有公司开展章程中未规定的活动。

* The Bubble Act made it illegal to establish new companies without statutory authority and prevented existing companies from conducting activities not specified in their charters.

是银行间相互借贷存放在美联储的资金余额的利率,通常为隔夜利率。由七位美联储理事和十二家地区联邦储备银行行长组成的联邦公开市场委员会在其例行会议上设定目标利率。纽约联邦储备银行负责通过公开市场操作(在纽约市场买卖债券)来使该利率生效。

* This is the interest rate at which banks lend balances held at the Federal Reserve to one another, usually overnight. The Federal Open Market Committee, which is made up of the seven Federal Reserve Board governors and the presidents of the twelve regional Federal Reserve banks, sets a target rate at its regular meetings. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has the job of making this rate effective through open market operations (buying or selling bonds in the New York market).

他的措辞一如既往 地晦涩难懂:“显然,持续的低通胀意味着对未来的不确定性降低,而较低的风险溢价则意味着更高的股票价格……但我们如何判断非理性繁荣是否已经过度推高了资产价值……?如果金融资产泡沫破裂不会对实体经济构成威胁,那么作为中央银行家,我们无需担忧……但我们不应低估资产市场与经济之间相互作用的复杂性,也不应对此掉以轻心。”

* His wording was characteristically opaque: ‘Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks . . . But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values . . . ? We as central bankers need not be concerned if a collapsing financial asset bubble does not threaten to impair the real economy . . . But we should not underestimate, or become complacent about, the complexity of the interactions of asset markets and the economy’.

* 该公司最初打算命名为 Enteron,直到《华尔街日报》指出“enteron”一词源于希腊语,意为肠子。

* The company was originally going to be called Enteron until the Wall Street Journal pointed out that ‘enteron’ is a Greek-derived word for the intestines.

* 典型的墨西哥湾沿岸房屋保险保单包含飓风免赔额附加条款,规定对“由飓风引起或导致的风、阵风、冰雹、雨、龙卷风或旋风造成的承保财产的直接物理损失或损坏”的任何索赔,均适用一定比例的免赔额。然而,通常存在如下除外责任:“我们不承保……若无以下一项或多项除外事件,则不会发生的任何损失”,例如“水灾,指……洪水、地表水、波浪、潮汐、海啸、湖震(湖浪)、水体溢出或上述任何一种水体喷溅,无论是否由风力驱动”。此外,“无论以下情况如何,我们均不承保此类损失:(a) 除外事件的起因;或 (b) 损失的其他原因;或 (c) 是否有其他原因与除外事件同时发生或按任何顺序发生,导致损失;或 (d) 该事件是突然发生还是逐渐发生……这是一个典型的条款细则,旨在以投保人难以理解的方式限制保险公司的责任。

* A typical Gulf Coast homeowner’s policy has a Hurricane Deductible Endorsement, with a percentage deduction applying to any claim for ‘direct physical loss or damage to covered property caused by wind, wind gust, hail, rain, tornadoes, or cyclones caused by or resulting from a hurricane’. However, there is usually an exclusion along these lines: ‘We do not insure . . . for any loss which would not have occurred in the absence of one or more of the following excluded events’, such as ‘Water Damage, meaning . . . flood, surface water, waves, tidal water, tsunami, seiche [lake wave], overflow of a body of water, or spray from any of these, all whether driven by wind or not’. Moreover, ‘We do not insure for such loss regardless of: (a) the cause of the excluded event; or (b) other causes of the loss; or (c) whether other causes acted concurrently or in any sequence with the excluded event to produce the loss; or (d) whether the event occurs suddenly or gradually . . .’ This is a classic example of small print designed to limit the insurer’s liability in a way not readily intelligible to the policy-holder.

* 2005 年美国财产和意外伤害保险公司的税后净收入为 430 亿美元,2006 年为 640 亿美元,而前三年的平均税后净收入不到 240 亿美元。

* US property and casualty insurance companies had net after-tax income of $43 billion in 2005 and $64 billion in 2006, compared with an average of less than $24 billion in the preceding three years.

* 斯克鲁格斯的同伙蒂莫西·巴尔杜奇被录音,他曾向拉克伊法官提供4万美元。巴尔杜奇告诉拉克伊:“除了你我之外,世界上唯一讨论过这件事的人就是我和迪克。呃,就像我说的,这世上只有三个人知道这件事……其中两个就坐在这里,另一个,呃,就是斯克鲁格斯……我和他,嗯,该怎么说呢,在过去的五六年里,我们之间有一些不可告人的秘密,你知道,我和他都知道这些秘密的下落。” 2007年11月1日,巴尔杜奇打电话给斯克鲁格斯,告诉他法官现在感觉“在事实和法律方面比以前更加无处遁形”,并问斯克鲁格斯是否“愿意再做点什么,你知道,大概十来个人”。斯克鲁格斯说他会“处理好这件事”。

* Scruggs’s associate Timothy Balducci was taped offering $40,000 to Judge Lackey. ‘The only person in the world outside of me and you that has discussed this is me and Dick,’ Mr Balducci told Lackey. ‘We, uh, like I say, it ain’t but three people in this world that know anything about this . . . and two of them are sitting here, and the other one, uh, being Scruggs . . . He and I, um, how shall I say, for over the last five or six years there, there are bodies buried that, that you know, that he and I know where.’ On 1 November 2007 Balducci called Scruggs to tell him that the Judge now felt ‘a little more exposed on the facts and the law than he was before’ and to ask if Scruggs ‘would do a little something else, you know, to ’bout 10 or so more’. Scruggs said he would ‘take care of it’.

* 有关这一关键区别的进一步讨论,请参阅后记,第 343-4 页。

* For a further discussion of this crucial distinction see the Afterword, pp. 343–4.

人类往往在马儿脱缰之后才关上马厩的门,这一点在火灾保险的历史中体现得淋漓尽致。1835年纽约大火之后,美国各州开始要求保险公司维持充足的储备金。 1842年汉堡大火之后,再保险制度应运而生,成为保险公司分担重大灾害风险的一种方式。

* The human propensity to shut stable doors after horses have bolted is well illustrated by the history of fire insurance. It was after the New York fire of 1835 that American states began to insist that insurance companies maintain adequate reserves. It was after the Hamburg fire of 1842 that reinsurance was developed as a way for insurance companies to share the risk of major disasters.

* 华莱士也是爱丁堡哲学学会的成员,他向该学会提交了《古代和现代人类数量的论文》,这部作品在某些方面预示了托马斯·马尔萨斯后来的《人口原理》

* Wallace was also a member of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, to which he presented his ‘Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind in Ancient and Modern Times’, a work which in some respects anticipated Thomas Malthus’s later Essay on the Principle of Population.

斯科特 是第一次拉丁美洲债务危机引发的金融危机的受害者(见第二章)。或许,他也是自己对房地产贪婪的受害者。为了支付他在阿伯茨福德心爱的乡间别墅的费用,这位作家成为了出版他作品的印刷公司詹姆斯·巴兰坦公司及其附属出版社约翰·巴兰坦公司的隐形合伙人。他还投资了自己的出版商阿奇博尔德·康斯特布尔,认为这些股权投资的回报将高于传统的版税。他一直对这些商业利益秘而不宣,认为这与他作为巡回法庭书记员和郡长的身份不符。1825年,巴兰坦和康斯特布尔公司的倒闭使斯科特背负了11.7万至13万英镑的债务。斯科特没有选择出售阿伯茨福德,而是发誓要靠写作来摆脱困境。他成功了,但为此付出了相当大的健康代价,于 1832 年去世。如果他早些去世,债权人将成为苏格兰寡妇保险的受益人。

* Scott was a victim of the financial crisis triggered by the first Latin American debt crisis (see Chapter 2). Perhaps he was also a victim of his own appetite for real estate. To help finance the cost of his beloved country seat at Abbotsford, the author had become a sleeping partner in the printers that published his books, James Ballantyne and Co., and the associated publishing house of John Ballantyne & Co. He was also an investor in his own publisher, Archibald Constable, believing that the returns on these equity stakes would be superior to traditional royalties. He kept these business interests secret, believing them to be incompatible with his standing as a Clerk to the Court of Sessions and a Sheriff. The failure of Ballantyne and Constable in 1825 left Scott with debts of between £117,000 and £130,000. Rather than sell Abbotsford, Scott vowed to write his way back into the black. He succeeded, but at considerable cost to his own health, dying in 1832. Had he died earlier, the creditors would have been the beneficiaries of the Scottish Widows policy.

* 1986 年的原版广告由大卫·贝利拍摄,演员罗杰·摩尔的女儿黛博拉扮演了一位极具魅力的苏格兰寡妇。

* The original 1986 advertisement was photographed by David Bailey with the actor Roger Moore’s daughter Deborah as the improbably alluring Scottish Widow.

* 弗里德曼在 1988 年指出,他曾就通货膨胀问题向中国政府提出过类似的建议,但他发现,尽管中国政府“过去和现在都比智利军政府更加专制”,但他并没有因为愿意向这样一个邪恶的政府提供建议而受到“铺天盖地的抗议”。

* Friedman noted in 1988 that he had given much the same advice on inflation to the Chinese government, yet found that he received no ‘avalanche of protests for [his] having been willing to give advice to so evil a government’, despite the fact that it ‘has been and still is more repressive than the Chilean military junta’.

也就是说 ,如果所有衍生品都得到支付,则未偿付的名义金额约为合约估计市场价值的 41 倍。

* That is to say, the notional amount outstanding if all derivatives paid out is roughly forty-one times the contracts’ estimated market value.

* 激发了可能无法实现的期望。1975年至2006年间,英格兰房价上涨了15倍,使得几乎所有无法从父母那里获得经济援助的首次购房者都无法拥有自己的住房。

* Arousing expectations which it may be impossible to fulfil. The fifteen-fold increase of house prices in England between 1975 and 2006 has put home ownership out of reach for nearly all those first-time buyers who cannot get financial assistance from their parents.

爱尔兰 以83%的家庭拥有自有住房的比例位居榜首,其次是澳大利亚和英国(均为69%)、加拿大(67%)和美国(65%)。日本的这一比例为60%,法国为54%,德国为43%。但需要注意的是,这些数据是2000年的数据。自那以后,美国的这一比例已上升至68%以上。此外,还要注意地区差异:中西部和南部居民拥有自有住房的比例(72%)明显高于西部和东北部居民。中西部和南部的住房价格更为亲民。西弗吉尼亚州的自有住房比例为78%,而纽约州仅为46%。

* Ireland leads the field with 83 per cent of households owning their own homes, followed by Australia and the United Kingdom (both 69 per cent), Canada (67 per cent) and the United States (65 per cent). The figure for Japan is 60 per cent, for France 54 per cent and for Germany 43 per cent. Note, however, that these figures are for 2000. Since then, the figure for the United States has risen to above 68 per cent. Note also the regional variation: Midwesterners and Southerners are significantly more likely to own their own homes (72 per cent do) than people living in the West and the Northeast. Housing is more affordable in the Midwest and South. 78 per cent of West Virginians own their own homes; just 46 per cent of New Yorkers do.

人生总是充满变数,德莫林斯小姐。”

* ‘Life is always uncertain, Miss Demolines.’

“我知道你现在在刨根问底。但你现在真的不觉得,在曼城投入的资金总是非常不稳定吗?来得快去得也快。”

‘You’re quizzing now, I know. But don’t you feel now, really, that City money is always very chancy? It comes and goes so quick.’

“至于钱财,我觉得所有钱都一样,”约翰尼说。“土地和资金可不一样。妈妈把每一分钱都抵押在了土地上,贷款利率4%。这让人感觉很安心!土地总不会跑掉吧。”(第25章)

‘As regards the going, I think that’s the same with all money,’ said Johnny. ‘Not with land, or the funds. Mamma has every shilling laid out in a first-class mortgage on land at four per cent. That does make one feel so secure! The land can’t run away.’ (Ch. 25)

* 如今,约有 3700 万美国个人和夫妇申报了最高 100 万美元的抵押贷款扣除额,这给美国财政部造成了 760 亿美元的损失。

* Today, around 37 million American individuals and couples claim the deduction on mortgages of up to $1,000,000, at a cost of $76 billion to the US Treasury.

* 关键的立法是 1980 年的《存款机构放松管制和货币控制法》和 1982 年的《加恩-圣日耳曼存款机构法》。

* The crucial legislation was the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 and the Garn-St Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982.

* 其中最臭名昭著的案例是查尔斯·基廷的案例。基廷在加州尔湾的林肯储蓄贷款公司在受到联邦住房贷款银行的压力时,得到了包括约翰·麦凯恩在内的五位参议员的支持。麦凯恩此前曾接受过基廷的政治捐款,但参议院道德委员会认定他的行为并无不当。

* The most notorious case was that of Charles Keating, whose Lincoln Savings and Loan in Irvine, California, received support from five Senators, among them John McCain, when it came under pressure from the Federal Home Loan Bank. McCain had previously accepted political contributions from Keating but was cleared of acting improperly by the Senate Ethics Committee.

* 截至2006年底,政府支持企业(GSE)持有的抵押贷款份额最大,占未偿债务总额的30%。商业银行持有22%;住房抵押贷款支持证券(RMBS)、担保债务凭证(CDO)和其他资产支持证券占14%;储蓄机构占13%;州和地方政府占8%;人寿保险公司占6%。其余部分由个人持有。

* At the end of 2006 the GSEs held the largest share of mortgages, amounting to 30 per cent of the total debt outstanding. Commercial banks held 22 per cent; residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS), CDOs and other asset-backed securities accounted for 14 per cent of the total; savings institutions for 13 per cent; state and local governments for 8 per cent of the total; and life insurance companies for 6 per cent. Individuals held the rest.

* 我和妻子就大规模杠杆投资英国房地产市场(这是她偏爱的投资策略)是否明智这个问题争论不休,最终她胜出,因为她认为我宁愿住在大学宿舍里,然后去炒股。当然,最佳策略应该是持有多元化的房地产和全球股票投资组合,并适度利用杠杆融资。

* In the long-standing argument I have had with my wife about the unwisdom of a large-scale leveraged play on the UK property market (her favoured financial strategy), she therefore emerges as the winner on the assumption that I would have preferred to live in rented university accommodation and played the UK stock market. The optimal strategy would of course have been to own a diversified portfolio of real estate and global stocks, financed with a moderate amount of leverage.

* 1997年至2006年间,美国消费者估计从房屋净值中提取了9万亿美元的现金。到2006年第一季度,房屋净值提取额占个人可支配收入的近10%。

* Between 1997 and 2006, US consumers withdrew an estimated $9 trillion in cash from the equity in their homes. By the first quarter of 2006 home equity extraction accounted for nearly 10 per cent of disposable personal income.

美国 法律的一个重要特点是,在许多州(并非所有州),抵押贷款通常属于“无追索权”贷款,这意味着当借款人违约时,抵押贷款机构只能收回房产价值,而不能扣押其他财产(例如汽车或银行存款),也不能对未来的工资设置留置权。一些经济学家认为,这会使借款人有很强的违约动机。

* It is an important feature of American law that in many states (though not all) mortgages are generally ‘no recourse’ loans, meaning that when there is a default the mortgage lender can only collect the value of the property and cannot seize other property (e.g. a car or money in the bank) or put a lien on future wages. According to some economists, this gives borrowers a strong incentive to default.

其中一只 基金名为“高等级结构化信贷策略增强杠杆基金”。

* One of which gloried in the name High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund.

当国际货币基金组织称其为“自大萧条以来最大的金融冲击”时,几乎没有人提出异议

* Few dissented when the International Monetary Fund called it ‘the largest financial shock since the Great Depression’.

* 此后发生的事件确实证实了这一点。

* Events subsequent to this writing have indeed borne this out.

* 比尔和梅琳达·盖茨对 Pro Mujer 的组织印象深刻,他们的基金会向该组织捐赠了 310 万美元。

* So impressed have Bill and Melinda Gates been by Pro Mujer that their Foundation is giving the organization $3.1 million.

* “新兴市场”一词最早由世界银行经济学家安托万·范·阿格特梅尔在 20 世纪 80 年代提出。

* The term ‘emerging markets’ was first used in the 1980s by the World Bank economist Antoine van Agtmael.

* 马歇尔计划的总支出相当于乔治·马歇尔将军发表那篇意义深远的演讲当年美国国民生产总值的约5.4%,或占该计划整个实施期间(从1948年4月《对外援助法》通过到1952年6月最后一笔款项支付)的1.1%。如果2003年至2007年间实施马歇尔计划,其成本将高达5500亿美元。相比之下,布什政府在2001年至2006年间实际提供的对外经济援助总额不足1500亿美元,平均不到GDP的0.2%。

* The total amount disbursed under the Marshall Plan was equivalent to roughly 5.4 per cent of US gross national product in the year of General George Marshall’s seminal speech, or 1.1 per cent spread over the whole period of the programme, which dated from April 1948, when the Foreign Assistance Act was passed, to June 1952, when the last payment was made. If there had been a Marshall Plan between 2003 and 2007, it would have cost $550 billion. By comparison, actual foreign economic aid under the Bush administration between 2001 and 2006 totalled less than $150 billion, an average of below 0.2 per cent of GDP.

*罗斯托是《经济增长阶段:非共产主义宣言》 (1960年) 的作者,他为20世纪60年代的民主党政府提供了大致同等的经济和战略建议。作为林登·约翰逊的国家安全顾问,他与越南战争的升级密切相关。

* Rostow, the author of The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960), offered economic and strategic advice in roughly equal measure to the Democratic administrations of the 1960s. As the equivalent of National Security Adviser to Lyndon Johnson, he was closely associated with the escalation of the Vietnam War.

以下 是根据约翰·威廉姆森1989年最初提出的十点建议的简要概述:1. 实施财政纪律;2. 改革税收;3. 放宽利率;4. 增加医疗和教育支出;5. 保障产权;6. 将国有企业私有化;7. 放松市场管制;8. 采用竞争性汇率;9. 消除贸易壁垒;10. 消除外国直接投资壁垒。

* Here is a brief overview of the ten points, based on John Williamson’s original 1989 formulation: 1. Impose fiscal discipline; 2. Reform taxation; 3. Liberalize interest rates; 4. Raise spending on health and education; 5. Secure property rights; 6. Privatize state-run industries; 7. Deregulate markets; 8. Adopt a competitive exchange rate; 9. Remove barriers to trade; 10. Remove barriers to foreign direct investment.

自1966年首次使用“对冲基金”一词来描述阿尔弗雷德·温斯洛·琼斯于1949年设立的多空基金(该基金同时持有美国股市的多头和空头头寸)以来,大多数对冲基金都是有限责任合伙企业。因此,它们不受1933年《证券法》和1940年《投资公司法》相关规定的约束,这两项法律限制了共同基金和投资银行在杠杆和卖空方面的操作

* Since the term was first used, in 1966, to describe the long-short fund set up by Alfred Winslow Jones in 1949 (which took both long and short positions on the US stock market), most hedge funds have been limited liability partnerships. As such they have been exempted from the provisions of the 1933 Securities Act and the 1940 Investment Company Act, which restrict the operations of mutual funds and investment banks with respect to leverage and short selling.

* 从技术上讲,根据美国证券交易委员会的定义,卖空是指“出售卖方不拥有的证券,或通过交付卖方借入或为其账户借入的证券来完成的任何出售”。

* Technically, according to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, a short sale is ‘any sale of a security which the seller does not own or any sale which is consummated by the delivery of a security borrowed by, or for the account of, the seller’.

* 互换是一种衍生品:一种合约安排,其中一方同意向另一方支付固定利率,以换取适用于名义金额的浮动利率(通常是伦敦银行间同业拆借利率,即 Libor)。

* A swap is a kind of derivative: a contractual arrangement in which one party agrees to pay another a fixed interest rate, in exchange for a floating rate (usually the London interbank offered rate, or Libor), applied to a notional amount.

* 例如,摩根大通新兴市场债券指数与美国国债的利差从 1997 年 10 月的 3.3% 上升到 1998 年 7 月的 6.6%,再到 1998 年 9 月 10 日的 17.05%。

* For example, the spread over US Treasuries of the JP Morgan emerging market bond index rose from 3.3 per cent in October 1997, to 6.6 per cent in July 1998, to 17.05 per cent on 10 September 1998.

* 2007 年夏天,贝尔斯登和高盛等对冲基金的亏损报道预示着信贷危机的开始,这绝非巧合。

* It is surely no coincidence that it was reports of losses at hedge funds run by Bear Stearns and by Goldman Sachs that signalled the onset of the credit crunch in the summer of 2007.

事实上, 一些主权财富基金有着相对较长的历史。科威特投资局成立于1953年;新加坡淡马锡成立于1974年;阿联酋投资基金ADIA成立于1976年;新加坡政府投资公司(GIC)成立于1981年。

* Some sovereign wealth funds in fact have a relatively long history. The Kuwait Investment Authority was set up in 1953; Singapore’s Temasek in 1974; ADIA, the United Arab Emirates’ fund, in 1976; Singapore’s GIC in 1981.

2007年12月,中国投资有限责任公司董事长楼继伟斥资50亿美元收购了摩根士丹利9.9%的股份。他 将这一机会比作一只兔子出现在农夫面前。“如果我们看到一只肥兔子,”他说,“我们会毫不犹豫地开枪。”但他又补充道(指的是摩根士丹利股价随后的下跌),“有人可能会说,我们被摩根士丹利‘射杀’了。”

* Having paid $5 billion for a 9.9 per cent stake in Morgan Stanley in December 2007, the China Investment Corporation’s chairman Lou Jiwei compared the opportunity to a rabbit appearing in front of a farmer. ‘If we see a big fat rabbit,’ he said, ‘we will shoot at it.’ But he added (referring to the subsequent decline in Morgan Stanley’s share price), ‘Some people may say we were shot by Morgan Stanley.’

正如 彼得·伯恩斯坦所说,“我们大量引用过去的数据……但过去的数据……构成的是一系列事件,而非概率定律所要求的独立观测值。历史只为我们提供了一个……资本市场的样本,而不是成千上万个独立且随机分布的数字。” 拉里·尼尔也指出,同样的问题——样本量实际上只有一个——在地质学中也同样存在,而地质学是一门比金融史更高级的历史科学。

* As Peter Bernstein has said, ‘We pour in data from the past . . . but past data . . . constitute a sequence of events rather than a set of independent observations, which is what the laws of probability demand. History provides us with only one sample of the . . . capital markets, not with thousands of separate and randomly distributed numbers.’ The same problem – that the sample size is effectively one – is of course inherent in geology, a more advanced historical science than financial history, as Larry Neal has observed.

根据 1988年达成的巴塞尔协议I,银行资产根据信用风险分为五类,风险权重从零(例如,本国政府债券)到100%(公司债务)不等。国际银行必须持有相当于其风险加权资产8%的资本。巴塞尔协议II于2004年首次发布,但在全球范围内逐步推广,其规则更为复杂,区分了信用风险、操作风险和市场风险,其中市场风险强制要求使用风险价值(VaR)模型。具有讽刺意味的是,在2007-2008年,流动性风险与其他风险被归入“剩余风险”的范畴。这些规则不可避免地与所有银行力求最小化资本、从而提高股本回报率的动机相冲突。

* Under the Basel I rules agreed in 1988, assets of banks are divided into five categories according to credit risk, carrying risk weights ranging from zero (for example, home country government bonds) to 100 per cent (corporate debt). International banks are required to hold capital equal to 8 per cent of their risk-weighted assets. Basel II, first published in 2004 but only gradually being adopted around the world, sets out more complex rules, distinguishing between credit risk, operational risk and market risk, the last of which mandates the use of value at risk (VaR) models. Ironically, in the light of 2007–8, liquidity risk is combined with other risks under the heading ‘residual risk’. Such rules inevitably conflict with the incentive all banks have to minimize their capital and hence raise their return on equity.

* 用安德鲁·洛的话来说:“对冲基金是金融界的加拉帕戈斯群岛……创新、演变、竞争、适应、诞生和消亡,所有进化现象的发生速度都异常之快。”

* In Andrew Lo’s words: ‘Hedge funds are the Galapagos Islands of finance . . . The rate of innovation, evolution, competition, adaptation, births and deaths, the whole range of evolutionary phenomena, occurs at an extraordinarily rapid clip.’

* 第八章和第九章写于2018年夏季,大约在第一版完成十年之后。我非常感谢Michael Boskin、John Cochrane、Nick Kumleben、Matt McLennan、Chris Miller、Ken Rogoff、Paul Schmelzing、John Taylor、Dimitris Valatsas和Sean Xu对早期草稿提出的宝贵意见。此外,我还要感谢Brandon Brier、Harry Elliott和Josh Zoffer提供的研究协助,以及Jim Dickson的校对工作。

* Chapters 8 and 9 were written in the summer of 2018, roughly ten years after the completion of the first edition. I have benefited greatly from comments on earlier drafts by Michael Boskin, John Cochrane, Nick Kumleben, Matt McLennan, Chris Miller, Ken Rogoff, Paul Schmelzing, John Taylor, Dimitris Valatsas and Sean Xu. I would also like to thank Brandon Brier, Harry Elliott and Josh Zoffer for research assistance, and Jim Dickson for proof-reading.

* 这显然是一个低估,因为美联储还必须购买数百亿美元的不良资产。

* This was certainly an underestimate as the Fed would also have had to buy tens of billions of non-performing assets.

* 2012 年 1 月,美联储也开始定期公布联邦公开市场委员会所有成员对“适当”联邦基金利率的预测。

* In January 2012, the Fed also began publishing at regular intervals the forecasts of the ‘appropriate’ Fed funds rate produced by all members of the FOMC.

* PIIGS 是这场危机中最残酷的缩写。

* PIIGS was the cruellest acronym of the crisis.

* 巴塞尔协议 III 要求到 2019 年资本与“风险加权”资产的比率达到 7%。但实际上,正如 Admati 和 Hellwig 所指出的,实际资本更接近 2% 到 3%,几乎没有任何重大改进。

* Basel III calls for a 7 per cent ratio of capital to ‘risk-weighted’ assets by 2019. In practice, as Admati and Hellwig show, that is closer to between 2 and 3 per cent actual capital, hardly a major improvement.

尽管各大银行被处以总计超过3210亿美元的罚款,但只有一名美国银行家因与危机直接相关的欺诈行为而被判入狱:瑞士信贷的卡里姆·塞拉格尔丁。然而 ,在其他地方,有46名银行家被判入狱,其中包括25名冰岛银行家、11名西班牙银行家和7名爱尔兰银行家。

* Although the big banks were fined a total of more than $321 billion, only one US-based banker was jailed for fraud directly related to the crisis: Kareem Serageldin of Credit Suisse. However, forty-six bankers were jailed elsewhere, including twenty-five in Iceland, eleven in Spain, and seven in Ireland.

破解了加密难题的节点不仅 会获得交易区块费用奖励,还会获得额外的比特币(目前为 12.5 个)。随着比特币总量达到 2100 万枚,奖励数量会逐渐减少,之后将不再产生新的比特币。迄今为止,已挖出的 1700 万枚比特币中,相当一部分已不在流通。约 500 万枚被早期用户囤积(或遗失);另有 100 万枚由比特币的神秘创始人制造并持有。

* Nodes that have solved the cryptographic puzzle are rewarded not only with the transaction block fees, but also with additional Bitcoins (currently 12.5). This number will decline over time until the total number of Bitcoins reaches 21 million, after which point no new Bitcoins will ever be created. Of the total 17 million Bitcoins that have been mined to date, a substantial proportion are out of circulation. Around 5 million have been hoarded (or lost) by early adopters; a further one million were produced and retained by Bitcoin’s mysterious founder.

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